Tactics of Legitimation in the Psychedelic Sciences
American Behavioral Scientist September 11, 2012 M. Corbin 9 citations
Psychedelic substances enabled spirituality to enter the scientific laboratory by making it more accessible to scientific methods. From a feminist sociology of knowledge perspective, these controversial sciences reveal how politics of knowledge shape the relationship between demarcated and historically hierarchical systems. Discourse analysis shows that psychedelic scientists used tactics of legitimation to justify studying these substances and their associated spirituality against dominant scientific knowledges. Drawing on feminist theories, the analysis examines the epistemological costs of this assimilation in relation to intersecting politics of race, class, and gender. The project demonstrates how a feminist perspective on sociology of knowledge enhances analyses of the co-constitutive relationships between knowledge, power, and consciousness.