From Renaissance to Confluence: A paradigm shift from the Global South in psychedelic science.

Contemporary psychedelic science has consolidated within a asymmetrical political and epistemic order. Framed by the dominant narrative of a “psychedelic renaissance,” biomedical legitimacy and regulatory authority have operated as renewed mechanisms of coloniality, centralizing epistemic and institutional power in the Global North, and relegating Indigenous peoples and Global South communities to the role of cultural origin without decision-making authority. This symposium advances the argument that the field is not undergoing a temporary ethical or governance crisis, but confronting the historical exhaustion of a colonial paradigm of knowledge production.

We propose psychedelic confluence as a paradigm-shifting framework for reorienting psychedelic science. Confluence does not seek inclusion within existing institutional architectures, nor the integration of subalternized knowledges into dominant epistemic regimes. Instead, it names the encounter of multiple epistemic rivers that retain their course, force, and sovereignty, thereby destabilizing inherited hierarchies of evidence, authority, and value. Applied to psychedelic science, this framework necessitates a re-examination of how science defines evidence, risk, therapeutic legitimacy, and economic benefit.

The symposium is structured around three interdependent axes: (1) power, understood as a constitutive dimension of psychedelic science that links regulation to longer histories of colonial extraction; (2) kinship, articulated as a paradigm of healing grounded in relationality and collective memory; and (3) counter-colonial practice, conceived as a living politics of alliance oriented toward the co-production of knowledge.

Beyond inclusion or representation, this symposium advances a claim for cosmic diplomacy. Psychedelic confluence is not a conciliatory metaphor, but a scientific stance emerging from the Global South.