Horizons 2017: NEŞE DEVENOT, Ph.D. "The Role of Poetic Language in Psychedelic Science"

Neşe Devenot, Ph.D.

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, University of Puget Sound

Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics is an annual forum that

examines the role of psychedelic drugs in science, medicine,

culture and spirituality.

More information at HorizonsNYC.org

Neşe Devenot, Ph.D. is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where she is teaching classes on psychedelics and literature and writing her book project, "Chemical Poetics: The Literary History of Psychedelic Science." In 2016, she was awarded "Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies" from Breaking Convention and a “Women of the Psychedelic Renaissance” grant from Cosmic Sister. She was a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library's Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study. She received her Ph.D. in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

"The Role of Poetic Language in Psychedelic Science"

Within the field of Psychedelic Studies, qualitative research is a transdisciplinary method of inquiry that seeks to understand how individuals ascribe significance to their psychedelic experiences. In so doing, it complements traditional quantitative methods by A) providing insight into the psychological processes underlying therapeutic outcomes, and B) identifying new, testable hypotheses for future research. In analyzing verbal reports of psychedelic experiences, qualitative research necessarily depends on both science and poetics, since the communication of unprecedented experiences and non-ordinary states of consciousness necessarily rely on metaphor and other creative uses of language. For this reason, I argue that linguistic theory and poetic interpretation are as crucial as chemical analysis for analyzing data within psychedelic science, highlighting the importance of scholarly collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Since poetry employs creative metaphors to communicate subtle nuances of subjective experience, I argue for the inclusion of practicing poets in future studies in order to communicate seemingly ineffable experiences. Furthermore, since scholars of poetry are trained to discern meaning in non-ordinary language, literary scholars are well positioned to articulate the significance of linguistic data in the context of qualitative research.