The following is an excerpt from the article of the same name, by Alison Ledgerwood et al., which was recently published in UC Press’s open-access journal Collabra: Psychology.

In the face of longstanding and entrenched patterns of global and racial exclusion in psychology and academia more generally, scholars have been working to disrupt these historical and institutionalized defaults to create opportunities for inclusive excellence. In the summer of 2020, following the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in the United States and the ensuing global protests against anti-Black racism led by the Black Lives Matter movement, a brief window of time opened to “take audacious steps to address systemic racial inequality.” Black psychologists provided explicit accounts of the harm, exclusion, and exhaustion they experience on a daily basis in a moment when the historically and predominantly white field of psychology was finally listening. Meanwhile, Black psychologists and scholar-activists Dr. Pearis Bellamy and Dr. Della Mosley launched Academics for Black Survival and Wellness (A4BSW), a professional and personal development initiative that took place in the Summers of 2020-2022; each multi-week session involved workshops, roundtable discussions, and resources designed to teach non-Black academics how to use their racial privilege to mount projects that effectively and concretely disrupt inequality in academia.

In this paper, we describe one example of how such an initiative can build on prior and contemporary work to create concrete changes in academic publishing.

Over the next few years, a number of initiatives bloomed across our discipline that were focused on promoting anti-racism specifically, as well as inclusion and equity more broadly, in our institutions. In this paper, we describe one example of how such an initiative can build on prior and contemporary work to create concrete changes in academic publishing. Although this initiative focused specifically on enhancing inclusive excellence in two journals within the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, many of its processes and outcomes are broadly relevant and could be adapted to other local contexts in psychology and beyond. For example, insights from the task force’s process and recommendations were incorporated into the American Psychological Association’s (2023) Journal Reporting Guidelines for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice in Psychological Science.

Read more at Collabra: Psychology

Collabra: Psychology, the official journal of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), is a mission-driven, open-access journal from the University of California Press that shares not only the research it publishes, but also the value created by the psychology community during the peer-review process. Collabra: Psychology has 7 sections representing the broad field of psychology, and a highlighted focus area of “Methodology and Research Practice.”
Impact Factor: 3.1
Editor-in-Chief: Don van Ravenzwaaij, University of Groningen, Netherlands
online.ucpress.edu/collabra