Many of the EDM events known as "transformational festivals" provide psychedelic support spaces: volunteer projects caring for festivalgoers undergoing difficult drug experiences. Mostly drawn from the festival community, many volunteer carers ("sitters") subscribe to psychedelic culture discourse which frames these substances as aids to personal growth if handled appropriately. However, within the dominant paradigm of international drug prohibition, support projects must employ the contrasting discourse of harm reduction in order to gain access to events, visibility to festivalgoers, and integration with other support staff. Harm reduction, a paradigm for the care of drug users which began as a grassroots heroin addict advocacy movement, has since become associated with neoliberal, medicalised views of drugs, drug users and the self. This article considers how psychedelic support workers negotiate this discourse dichotomy in the course of caregiving, within differing national and local drug policy climates. Early findings are presented from ethnographic fieldwork as a psychedelic support volunteer with three organisations at seven festivals, combining participant observation and in-depth interviews with nineteen support workers. Events in the UK, the US and Portugal were studied due to these countries' contrasting policy regimes. Points of conflict between the psychedelic and harm reduction discourses were found to create tensions both within the support organisations and in their relations with on-site medics, security guards, festival organisers and police. The findings suggest that mainstream harm reduction discourses may be a poor fit for psychedelics and that risks inhere in their adoption by festival support spaces, such as abjection of drug users in difficulty which may create a trust-damaging divide between users and workers.

Immersive ethnographic research can be profoundly destabilising for researchers' sense of identity, and the attempt to inhabit and reconcile dual identities as researcher and participant can take a severe emotional toll. Prior to the reflexive turn in qualitative sociology, this identity work remained largely unacknowledged. Feminist critiques of positivist social science, along with personal accounts portraying the messy, chaotic aspects of research, have helped to create a new climate in which researchers can openly examine their identity conflicts and even recognise them as an integral part of their research. However, advice on navigating these situations remains somewhat limited. This article is a reflexive account of issues encountered while researching the practice of psychedelic support-the provision of emergency care to people undergoing drug-related crises-within the transformational festival scene in the United Kingdom, the United States and Portugal. Transformational festival settings are engineered to disrupt everyday experiences of identity and selfhood and induce emotional vulnerability. Thus, they throw issues of researcher identity and its management into sharp relief. Physically and emotionally intense fieldwork settings can bring about non-ordinary mental states in the researcher which can put habitual working practices and capacities out of reach. This effect contributed to a painful disjunction between my researcher and participant identities, which centred on the struggle to create linear, written narratives of largely embodied and non-verbal experiences. However, I found that the effect was somewhat mitigated by developing fluid, nonlinear, multisensory working practices and documentation methods which were more appropriate to the research setting and the mental states it induced. I conclude that ethnographers in intense or extreme field settings can benefit greatly from methods and tools which work even when we are out of our everyday minds.

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Many of the EDM events known as "transformational festivals" provide psychedelic support spaces: volunteer projects caring for festivalgoers undergoing difficult drug experiences. Mostly drawn from the festival community, many volunteer carers ("sitters") subscribe to psychedelic culture discourse which frames these substances as aids to personal growth if handled appropriately. However, within the dominant paradigm of international drug prohibition, support projects must employ the contrasting discourse of harm reduction in order to gain access to events, visibility to festivalgoers, and integration with other support staff. Harm reduction, a paradigm for the care of drug users which began as a grassroots heroin addict advocacy movement, has since become associated with neoliberal, medicalised views of drugs, drug users and the self. This article considers how psychedelic support workers negotiate this discourse dichotomy in the course of caregiving, within differing national and local drug policy climates. Early findings are presented from ethnographic fieldwork as a psychedelic support volunteer with three organisations at seven festivals, combining participant observation and in-depth interviews with nineteen support workers. Events in the UK, the US and Portugal were studied due to these countries' contrasting policy regimes. Points of conflict between the psychedelic and harm reduction discourses were found to create tensions both within the support organisations and in their relations with on-site medics, security guards, festival organisers and police. The findings suggest that mainstream harm reduction discourses may be a poor fit for psychedelics and that risks inhere in their adoption by festival support spaces, such as abjection of drug users in difficulty which may create a trust-damaging divide between users and workers.

In 1997 the Internet was seen by many as a tool for radical reinterpretation of physicality and gender. Cybertheorists predicted we would leave our bodies behind and interact online as disembodied minds, and that the technology would reshape the way we saw ourselves. However, physicality has proved to be an inextricable part of all our interactions. Changing Internet technology has allowed Net users to find a myriad ways to perform and express their gender online.In this paper I consider attitudes to gender on the Net in 1997, when the main concerns were the imbalance between men and women online and whether it was possible or desirable to bring the body into online interactions. In much of the discourse surrounding gender online, a simple binary was assumed to exist. I go on to consider the extent to which those attitudes have changed today. Through my own experience of setting up a women's community on Livejournal, and my observations of a men's community set up in response, I conclude that though traditional attitudes to gender have largely translated to the Net and the binary is still the default view, some shifts have occurred. For example, between 1997 and today there seems to have been a fundamental change in perceptions of women's attitudes to adversarial debate, and an increase in awareness of genders beyond the binary.In addition, experience and preliminary investigation lead me toward a hypothesis that today's female-identified Net users are engaged in more conscious and active exploration and performance of their gender online than male-identified users are.