Breaking Convention: Europe's Largest Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness

What Is Breaking Convention?

Breaking Convention is a biennial multidisciplinary conference on psychedelic consciousness, widely described as Europe's largest event of its kind. Founded in 2011 in the United Kingdom, it brings together over 200 presenters from around the world to explore psychedelic science, culture, and experience across an unusually broad range of disciplines — from neuroscience, psychiatry, and pharmacology to anthropology, philosophy, art, history, and law.

What distinguishes Breaking Convention from more narrowly focused scientific conferences is the deliberate integration of academic research with cultural and creative programming. A typical three-day conference includes not only peer-reviewed research presentations and panel discussions but also a visionary art exhibition, a cinema program of psychedelic-related films, live music, installations, and workshops spanning practical, therapeutic, and artistic topics. This multifaceted format reflects a conviction that psychedelic consciousness cannot be fully understood through any single disciplinary or methodological lens.

The conference has grown substantially since its founding. What began as a gathering of approximately 500 delegates at the University of Kent has expanded into an event that sells over a thousand tickets across more than 40 countries. Breaking Convention has also produced a series of published anthologies — collections of selected academic papers from each conference edition — that serve as permanent records of the research presented and contribute to the scholarly literature on psychedelic studies.

History of the Conference

Breaking Convention was co-founded by David Luke, a professor of exceptional experience at the University of Greenwich, alongside a team of colleagues committed to creating a serious academic space for psychedelic research in the United Kingdom. The conference emerged at a pivotal moment in the resurgence of psychedelic science — a period when institutions including Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich were reopening rigorous investigation into substances such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and ayahuasca.

Timeline of Editions

The inaugural conference at the University of Kent in April 2011 featured approximately 80 talks alongside workshops, music, and psychedelic cinema, establishing the multidisciplinary template that would define all subsequent editions. The event quickly outgrew its initial venue, and from 2013 through 2019 it was hosted at the University of Greenwich in London, where it expanded to accommodate over 150 academic presentations per edition alongside a growing cultural program.

The conference schedule was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented the planned 2021 event. Breaking Convention returned in 2023 at a new home — the University of Exeter — and held its seventh biennial edition there in April 2025. The move to Exeter brought the conference to a campus setting outside London for the first time since 2011, offering a different atmosphere while maintaining the event's established format and community.

Throughout its history, Breaking Convention has maintained its connection to the academic world by hosting the conference at university venues. This positioning reinforces the seriousness and scholarly orientation of the event while also reflecting the growing institutional acceptance of psychedelic research within British higher education.

Conference Themes and Research Topics

The research program at Breaking Convention spans an exceptionally wide range of topics. The conference describes itself as covering "human and social sciences, law, politics, art, history and philosophy" in addition to the natural and clinical sciences. This breadth is deliberate and represents one of the conference's defining commitments.

Clinical and Pharmacological Research

Presentations on the clinical applications of psychedelics form a significant component of the program. Topics have included psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression and end-of-life anxiety, MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, the pharmacology of LSD and its therapeutic potential, ketamine in psychiatric practice, and the safety profiles and risk factors associated with various psychedelic substances. Research on ayahuasca — including its pharmacology, neurological effects, and therapeutic applications — has featured at multiple editions.

Anthropology and Indigenous Traditions

Breaking Convention consistently includes sessions examining the cultural and historical dimensions of psychedelic use. Anthropological and ethnobotanical research on indigenous healing traditions — including Amazonian shamanic practices, the use of sacred plant medicines such as ayahuasca and peyote, and the traditional contexts within which these substances have been used for centuries — receives dedicated attention. This programming stream reflects an understanding that psychedelic substances did not originate in Western laboratories, and that indigenous knowledge systems offer perspectives that are both scientifically valuable and ethically essential to acknowledge.

Philosophy, Consciousness Studies, and the Humanities

Unlike many scientific conferences, Breaking Convention allocates significant program space to the humanities. Presentations have explored the philosophy of consciousness, the phenomenology of psychedelic experience, the relationship between psychedelics and creativity, the history of psychedelic movements, the sociology of psychedelic communities, and the ethical dimensions of psychedelic research and therapy. This engagement with the humanities reflects the conference's position that understanding psychedelic consciousness requires more than empirical measurement alone.

Law, Policy, and Regulation

Given the complex legal status of psychedelic substances in the United Kingdom and internationally, legal and policy topics feature regularly in the program. Sessions have addressed drug policy reform, the regulatory frameworks governing clinical research, the legal status of psychedelic substances across jurisdictions, and the challenges of translating research findings into approved medical treatments. The conference's location in the UK — where all classic psychedelics remain Class A controlled substances — gives these discussions a particular urgency.

Workshops and Cultural Program

One of Breaking Convention's most distinctive features is the integration of cultural and creative programming alongside the academic conference. This is not a supplementary add-on but a core element of the event's identity and mission.

Workshop Program

The workshop program offers hands-on, interactive sessions that complement the lecture-based academic presentations. Workshop topics have historically spanned a wide range, from therapeutic techniques and harm reduction practices to artistic and contemplative methods. Workshops provide participants with practical engagement and deeper exploration of specific subjects beyond what the standard conference format allows.

Visionary Art Exhibition

Every main Breaking Convention conference includes a curated visionary art exhibition displaying works that explore psychedelic themes and altered states of consciousness through visual media. The exhibition reflects the long-standing relationship between psychedelic experience and visual art — a connection documented across cultures from pre-Columbian ceramics depicting plant medicine use to the contemporary visionary art movement.

Cinema Program

The conference hosts a full cinema program featuring documentary and experimental films related to psychedelic consciousness, research, and culture. This program provides a narrative and visual dimension to the topics addressed in the academic sessions, often documenting the human stories behind the research or exploring psychedelic experience through cinematic art.

Music and Installations

Live music performances, DJ sets, and interactive art installations round out the cultural program. These elements contribute to the distinctive atmosphere of Breaking Convention — a conference that takes academic rigor seriously while acknowledging that the subject matter it addresses extends beyond what can be captured in academic papers alone.

Breaking Convention 2026 One-Day Summit

Breaking Convention is hosting a One-Day Summit on Saturday, May 16, 2026, at Woolwich Works in London, held in partnership with Seed Talks. This event serves as an interim gathering between the full biennial conferences — the seventh edition took place at the University of Exeter in April 2025, and the eighth full conference is anticipated for 2027.

The summit format is described as a day of talks and panels maintaining Breaking Convention's multidisciplinary approach — bringing together academics, researchers, clinicians, and artists for a focused exploration of the current psychedelic landscape. While more compact than the full three-day conference, it provides a dedicated space for the Breaking Convention community to convene between biennial events.

Specific speaker announcements and programming details for the 2026 summit are being released on an ongoing basis. Interested attendees should consult the official Breaking Convention website and mailing list for the most current information.

Why Breaking Convention Matters

Breaking Convention occupies a unique position in the global psychedelic research landscape, distinguished from other conferences by several characteristics that make it particularly significant.

First, its commitment to genuine multidisciplinarity is unusual. While many psychedelic conferences describe themselves as interdisciplinary, Breaking Convention enacts this principle more thoroughly than most, giving equal platform space to scientists, clinicians, anthropologists, philosophers, artists, and filmmakers. This creates an environment where insights from different ways of knowing can inform and challenge one another — a dynamic that is especially valuable in a field where the phenomena under study resist reduction to any single framework.

Second, the conference has played a demonstrable role in shaping the psychedelic research community in Europe. By consistently providing a high-quality academic platform in the United Kingdom since 2011, Breaking Convention helped establish the legitimacy of psychedelic research within British and European academia at a time when institutional support was far less certain than it is today. Researchers who presented early work at Breaking Convention have gone on to lead major clinical trials and establish research programs at leading universities.

Third, the published anthologies produced from conference proceedings — including Neurotransmissions (2015) and Psychedelic Pharmacology for the 21st Century — have contributed to the permanent scholarly record. Published by Strange Attractor Press, these volumes ensure that the research and ideas presented at the conference reach audiences beyond those who attended in person.

Fourth, Breaking Convention's cultural programming serves a function that goes beyond entertainment. The integration of art, cinema, and performance into a research conference reflects and models a holistic approach to psychedelic consciousness that resists the tendency to reduce these substances to their pharmacological properties alone. This approach resonates with the perspectives of indigenous traditions — including Amazonian shamanic cultures — that have always understood the use of sacred plants within a rich cultural, artistic, and ceremonial context.

For those interested in the academic study of ayahuasca and other plant medicines, Breaking Convention provides one of the most accessible and comprehensive entry points to the current state of research. The conference's free publication of video recordings from past editions on its YouTube channel makes years of presentations available to anyone with an internet connection — a significant contribution to the democratization of psychedelic knowledge.