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- Convenor:
-
Dagrún Jónsdóttir
(University of Iceland)
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Short Abstract
Individual papers on personal narrative
Long Abstract
This is a panel for individual papers on personal narrative
Accepted papers
Session 1 Monday 15 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper analyses 115 Scottish psychedelic user narratives of psychological transformation. Many described growth, insight and connection - but others spoke of underwhelm, trauma, or cultural estrangement - pointing to the difficulty of integrating a new sense of self in an unchanged social world.
Paper long abstract
Psychedelics are powerful, ancient mind-altering substances of indigenous cultural significance. In contemporary, rationalistic contexts, they are emerging as a potential treatment for mental ill health. Yet questions remain about how psychedelic-induced psychological change is experienced by users.
Recent literature highlights the importance of connection as a meta-theme and identifies social disconnection as a potential form of harm; however, this remains poorly understood. This work focuses on the personal narratives of individuals and how they experience psychological change as a result of meaningful psychedelic experience. Reflexive Thematic Analysis was used to examine 115 open-text participant responses, part of the PENS dataset.
Participants were found to experience psychedelic-induced psychological change through: (a) enhanced connectedness, (b) new perspectives on the self, (c) new perspectives on circumstances and relationships, (d) contextual and elusive insight, and (e) underwhelm and adversity (including a notable subtheme of ‘cultural estrangement’).
Connectedness was regarded as highly significant, and the development of new perspectives was interpreted more broadly as indicative of enhanced psychological flexibility. The theme of cultural estrangement suggests a role for value discrepancies, and may help explain one aspect of social disconnection — where individuals struggle to integrate their experience of a renewed sense of self with an unchanged social world. Whether the struggle to integrate the psychedelic experience might one day constitute a narrow clinical side effect or hold capacity for wider iatrogenic harm raises salient questions regarding medicalisation, the therapeutic process, and the cultural role of psychopharmacology.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents how students’ interactions with plants can be fostered or rekindled through a teaching approach that integrates research, drawing, mapping, and storytelling.
Paper long abstract
Epochal spatial and social transformations have led to the weakening of human-plant interactions and caused a generational rupture in both embodied plant knowledge and environmental responsibility.
This paper presents an approach that incorporates human-plant interactions into the curriculum to enhance students’ understanding of urban ecological relationships. The approach was implemented twice in a university teaching module (Oct 2024–Jul 2025), focusing on houseplants in the winter semester and outdoor plants in the summer semester. In the module, each student selected a plant and used a keyword to frame their relationship with it. Based on this keyword, they wrote a personal story describing their choice, encounter, learning (e.g., names, features, habitats, uses), and how the plant fostered connections with people and places. These stories, documented through photos, drawings, maps, interviews, and texts, were compiled into a booklet.
In total, twelve houseplant stories and nine outdoor-plant stories were collected. They reveal that fragile bonds between students and plants persist, though often obscured, and can be unraveled through narrative. The connections extended beyond plants themselves to families, hometowns, childhood, and ethnic culture, as reflected in keywords such as “nostalgično,” “friendship,” and “memories.” Other keywords, including “new beginning,” “reconnect,” “healing,” and “solace,” highlighted students’ openness and appreciation despite limited prior experience. Yet a closer reading also showed that these ties had once been disrupted by factors such as military conflict, emigration, life pressures, and social prejudice.
By doing so, the teaching approach contributes to sustaining young people’s bonds with plants and nurturing emergent ones.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how everyday supernatural experiences in the United States inspired a family narrative tradition that reaffirms belief of the tellers and fosters belief in succeeding generations. It proposes extending David Hufford’s experiential theory of belief to include memorate listeners.
Paper long abstract
This paper considers the role of the memorate in family tradition in the United States, in the context of a post-Enlightenment world of Weberian disenchantment where supernatural experience is deemed abnormal. Based on ethnographic interviews, the paper examines the memorates of three sisters (the author’s mother and two aunts) who share a closely related set of beliefs involving the survival of human consciousness after death which stem from personal interactions with spirits/the dead. The paper explores how these experiences have transformed into a family narrative tradition that has created a community of dialogue that serves to reaffirm the belief of the tellers as well as to create a foundation of belief in succeeding generations. In so doing, the paper extends folklorist David Hufford’s experiential theory of belief that centers on personal experience. It argues that Hufford’s theory should be expanded to include individuals whose close relationships of trust with memorate tellers leads to the memorates fundamentally impacting the listeners’ belief systems as well.
Paper short abstract
Individuals exercise creativity in their healing practices. This paper explores how individuals use the vernacular medical practice of home remedies to enact agency in their healing and connect with their communities.
Paper long abstract
In the proposed paper, I will explore home remedies as a facet of vernacular medicine, an eclectic and dynamic set of healing practices that operate alongside and in tandem with official medical systems. Both vernacular and official health systems operate in localized cultural contexts and influence the ways that individuals and communities relate to their health. The individuals I interviewed during my fieldwork cultivated personalized repertoires of home remedies often based on ingredients, recipes, and belief systems available in their local environment and practiced in domestic, kitchen-table settings. My contributors endowed these remedies with particular cultural meaning as practices related to the restoration and maintenance of their health. Enacting their personal home remedy practices enabled my contributors to exercise agency in their healing. These practices also relied upon supportive relationships as pathways of transmission, as well as sites of healing in their own right. The care inherent in the kin and community ties that my contributors described often contributed to the significance of home remedies in their lives. In relationship with people, plants, and the land, my contributors enacted the healing practice of home remedies to respond to their individual and communal health needs.