Social Action

The mission of the Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology is to promote deep reflection on community change and system transformation in which counselors, psychologists, and other human service professionals play a role. The journal aims to highlight ‘engaged scholarship’ and the very important social change work done by professionals and activists that would not normally find its way into publication. The journal thus attempts to break down the divide between theory and practice in one of the most critical areas of our work: social transformation toward social justice and peace. Potential authors are urged to pay special attention to the following guidelines for submissions.

Manuscripts submitted should be relevant to counselors, psychologists and related human service professionals as well as students and educators. Policy makers, community organizers, and activists should also find the content to be informative and relevant to their work.  

The following are examples of the types of submissions that are encouraged:

• Articulation of theory about social action: for example, the nature of power, group dynamics, organizational process, consciousness raising, resistance, ideology, strategy
• Examples of collaborative efforts to address a particular social issue, accompanied by ample examination of the process of the work, obstacles encountered
• Research using methodologies that bring the voices of communities and individuals most affected by particular social problems to the forefront
• Research documenting the nature and complexity of a particular social problem as revealed by attempts to address it
• Outcome research highlighting community interventions that have been successful in addressing social issues, or case studies of unsuccessful projects – both types paying attention to the factors contributing to success or ‘failure’
• Interviews of notable practitioners, community organizers, activists, psychologists, counselors and educators
• Dialogues between scientists/practitioners, policy makers and community members
• Reviews of books related to any of the above topics

Manuscripts should be solidly grounded in theory, practice and/or research. Examples of manuscripts that would not be appropriate for this journal include individual therapy methods or clinical problems that are addressed solely through individual interventions, problem-focused discussion without clear discussion of social action implications, descriptions of what should be done in the absence of any reflection on action that has been taken, and research that does not substantively include reflection on the process and role of the researcher.  Manuscripts whose sole intent is to present an opinion or partisan political perspective are not appropriate for this journal.

Manuscripts should be submitted as an MS Word document by email, in APA style, to jsacp@lclark.edu.  Be sure to include an abstract and five keywords for indexing purposes. We will consider manuscripts of any reasonable length, and are open to innovative formats, including multimedia.