Stories

How Civic Science Fellow Kuranda Morgan cultivates space to question, reflect, and connect

On a November morning in Berkeley, 40 people gathered in a room scattered with flowers. Handmade origami blooms sat at the center of each table. Flower stickers dotted name tags. And on a giant whiteboard, paper petals multiplied, each one representing an ethical dilemma that someone in the room was wrestling with in their work.

The participants included neuroscientists, geographers, public health researchers, Indigenous scholars, and community college instructors. This unlikely mix was brought together by Kuranda Morgan, a Civic Science Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, for a workshop aimed at grappling with questions that don’t fit neatly into any single discipline.

The exercise was dubbed the “Garden of Ethical Dilemmas,” where small groups identified tensions in their work where different values clash and mapped them onto paper flowers. What would it feel like to have this tension resolved? What happens if we don’t address it? What might a different discipline’s perspective reveal?

The workshop created what Morgan calls “a facilitated container to talk about really hard things.” The group discussed topics like funding insecurity and issues surrounding the identity of Indigenous scholars.

“It was beautiful,” she says. ”We had these small teams of neuroscientists and geographers and practitioners all working together on questions like, ‘What do we do about the fact that some communities see these substances as a sacrament, and some don’t?’”

Gathering the seeds

Morgan holds a master’s degree in social policy research from the London School of Economics, and for a decade, she worked on what she calls “the relationship between evidence, equity, and action.” At the United Kingdom’s innovation agency for social good, Nesta, she trained more than 2,000 public servants, academics, and nonprofit staff in how to access, evaluate, and use evidence and other forms of expertise across different levels of decision-making.

She arrived at UC Berkeley’s Center for Psychedelics in May 2024 as a newcomer to the topic, though not to the work of bridging research and practice. Her Fellowship focused on how to make psychedelic research accessible and useful for many different communities.

She began the way she begins most things. “I did a lot of interviews, I went to a lot of events and listened.” What she heard surprised her—not the content, exactly, but its weight. “The listening tour revealed to me the level of harm and power imbalance and complexity of this field.”

The history is layered: Indigenous stewardship of knowledge for millennia, the research resurgence of the 1950s, the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, the subsequent war on drugs. Many of these phases brought harm, such as “colonialism of knowledge, knowledge extraction, a lack of data sovereignty,” she says. “The war on drugs has systematically imprisoned Black people and people of color disproportionately.”

The listening tour was a reality check that made her acutely aware of her own role. “Who am I, a white, educated, middle-class woman, to come into this space and think that I can help in some way?”

Instead of retreating, Morgan found her path. “The communities I listened to provided the necessary mandate. It boils down to using my own reflexivity and skills and institutional access in service of communities already doing this work,” she says. “Civic science is really about constructing a new table for different perspectives—from policy to research to community groups to citizens—where we’re able to come together to learn from each other.”

Her timing proved fortuitous. Just as Morgan was synthesizing what she had learned, a new executive director arrived, and the Center launched a strategic planning process. “The insights from that listening tour helped inform the development of the Center strategy,” she says. She also helped with the second national survey, which found an increase in support for legalizing therapeutic use of psychedelics and for making it easier for scientists to study them.

One thread of Morgan’s work focused specifically on basic science research, where she noticed a gap. “Researchers who are trained in neuroscience aren’t trained in things like different ways of knowing, or power imbalances, or cultural contexts.”

And yet psychedelics research sits at a charged intersection. “We’re administering synthetic psilocybin, but for lots of communities, that’s a sacrament,” Morgan says. “There’s a whole body of knowledge around where these substances come from, the contexts and histories they carry, the ways people hold them in esteem, thoughts about the intelligence of these substances themselves. How do we bring these rich histories into a lab setting where you’re administering these substances to participants inside an fMRI machine?”

Sowing the garden

Hoping to bridge that gap for scientists, Morgan partnered with fellows at UC Berkeley’s Kavli Center for Science, Ethics, and the Public to conduct exploratory workshops in neuroscience labs. They also surveyed researchers at a major psychedelic science conference in the Bay Area, asking questions like, “How motivated are you to think about public engagement in your work? How often do you think about ethics? What do you want to learn more about?”

What they found is that scientists are hungry for broader knowledge, Morgan says. “They know that the field they’re conducting research in has these beautiful, rich, complex histories and ethical tensions, but there’s not a lot of time or space or opportunity to talk about it.”

That hunger led to the workshop with the paper flowers. Morgan and her colleagues structured the day around a framework inspired by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute based on the three components of human flourishing: being, becoming, belonging. The Garden of Ethical Dilemmas came midway through, after participants had reflected on their own values and identities, and before they turned to questions of community.

“We did a course evaluation, and it was really stunning,” Morgan says. “People loved it. To have a group of people that were able to be vulnerable and have really deep ‘aha’ moments about these substances, and how to conduct inquiry around them—it was fantastic.”

But Morgan is honest about the limits. “We had so many more basic scientists registered who just didn’t come, even though we had such a high indication of their interest when we visited their labs.” The barriers are systemic, she says. “If there’s no structural incentive, or if their PI is not saying ‘go to this thing,’ you’re already going to have a selected group of people.”

This has shaped her theory of change. “Do you engage the non-engaged, or do you engage the engaged? I’ve been going with engaging the engaged, because I believe in that kind of champion model of social change,” she says. “If you have people who are already motivated, they can affect their own circles.”

Shortly before her fellowship ended, the Center for Psychedelics hired Morgan as their permanent strategy director. She now works across the Center’s four areas: basic science, journalism, applied research and policy, and culture and community. She helps weave the Center’s intiatives into a cohesive strategy for social change, driving their mission to to advance psychedelics inquiry for public good.

What’s surprised her most is how small changes ripple outward. “It’s been really rewarding to see how the big is made up of the small,” she says. “Small changes to how you run meetings, how you open up space for different perspectives, can really make a big difference in creating that culture of questioning and challenging assumptions.”

As a member of a cohort of Fellows, Morgan has learned that civic science takes on many shapes and forms, both large and small. “So much of the capacity building in the Fellowship is about the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how’ of doing this work. How do we understand the problem? How do we work with communities to come up with a solution that’s fit for context, fit for purpose?”

For those drawn to civic science, she says trust the pull. “When I saw the Fellowship, I knew it was for me. It was like this instant knowing—that’s my job.”

Kuranda is a member of the 2024-25 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her fellowship was supported by the Dana Foundation.