Colloquium Meetings 2026-2027
Eirini Ketzitzidou Argyri
6 November 2026
Diversifying the Psyche: Reflections from a psychedelic PhD journey
Abstract: In this session, Eirini K. Argyri (Arket) shares her doctoral research and what she learned in navigating the journey through it. Her PhD was undertaken at the University of 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ as its Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre (EPIC) was taking shape, and both the research and the researcher grew alongside it.
Her thesis explored psychedelic experiences that unsettle people’s sense of what is real and their sense of self, and why these experiences can lead in different directions (the pluripotency of psychedelic experience). Regarding psychedelic integration, her work points to an unfolding developmental path that is largely shaped by the resources a person carries into a psychedelic experience and can reach afterwards.
Centring lived experience perspectives and drawing across disciplines, she will introduce the Ontologically Diversifying Experiences (ODE) framework and what it suggests about trust, support and epistemic justice: whose experiences are taken seriously, and on whose terms.
Woven throughout is a personal thread, reflecting the integral place of reflexivity in this research. What made this work possible? What can navigating the PhD’s ontological challenges offer as seeds for the future?
Bio: Eirini K. Argyri (Arket) is a researcher and educator working at the intersection of psychedelic studies, transformative learning and integration support. Her work explores how experiences that challenge ordinary assumptions about self, reality and meaning can lead to transformation, and how the distress that can accompany them might be better understood and supported. She completed her ESRC-funded PhD at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre (EPIC) with Celia Morgan, Leor Roseman, and Oliver Robinson and has been working with the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. She is now beginning a Research Fellowship on the Wellcome Trust-funded PATHS project, focussing on the ethos of psychedelic care in communities.
Eirini is a founding member of 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ's Transdisciplinary Psychedelic Colloquium and co-founded the Holistic Integration Community of Practice with J.P. Rennie, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and others with lived experience of non-ordinary states, to learn and grow with peers.
Her thesis on 'Navigating the Pluripotency of Psychedelic Experience: Learning from the challenges of Destabilisation' is available here: