JSI has a strong reputation as the leading venue for the psychological study of social issues; it’s also the standard-bearer for SPSSI. In the coming years, we hope to strengthen its position as the forum for psychologists and other social scientists who seek to push boundaries and move scholarly and policy conversations forward. We are committed to maintaining and strengthening JSI’s reputation as the premier publication venue in social issues and critical psychology. To do so, we intend to deepen JSI’s interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary engagement.

Specifically, we will emphasize the journal’s importance–necessity, even–for solving what Rittel and Webber (1973) called “wicked problems,” or those that cannot be solved using traditional tools or taken-for-granted approaches. Failure to engage literature beyond our discipline can mean that psychologists limit our audiences to ourselves. On the other hand, cursory engagement with only a few highly-cited authors or articles beyond psychology can lead scholars in other disciplines to perceive psychologists as “Columbusing” research topics that are already well-tread in other fields. As editors, we would aim to foster meaningful and in-depth interdisciplinarity to strengthen the quality and impact of JSI’s papers and to enlarge JSI’s audience.

We believe JSI has much to offer to help us–the collective social justice-oriented scholarly community–to make sense of this confusing and disturbing time both in the United States and worldwide. SPSSI’s flagship journal provides an opportunity to agenda-set for the psychology of social issues by strategically seeding issues on the most pressing topics of the contemporary moment.

Toward these ends, we envision an editorial term characterized by some evergreen topics in social psychology (e.g., ideology, persuasion, prejudice, and xenophobia) with a focus on how these are manifesting in new and vexing ways in the US and globally, such as (not ranked):

• Gender gap in political ideology, rise of the “manosphere”
• Health and science skepticism
• Misinformation: who believes it and why?
• Activism left and right: social movements after BLM, Dobbs, Skermeti
• Current perceptions of inequity and deservingness (i.e., meritocracy and system justification in late capitalism)
• Social media across the lifespan
• Aggression: tolerance for, appetite for (e.g., entertainment)
• Attitudes toward authority and political dominance (e.g., fascism)
• Race, racialization, and nationalism
• Perceptions and uses of history (cf. similar issue in 2013), links to identity, collective nostalgia, whose history?, teaching/book/DEI bans
• Reproductive justice, revisited (last addressed in 2020, pre-pandemic), including the impact of current policies post-Dobbs
• AI and inequity
• Critical methods and social issues research
• Precarity and critical social psychology

Consistent with various arguments by speakers at the recent 2025 SPSSI conference in Portland (e.g., Abby Stewart, Heather Bullock, and Brian Smedley), we know that these precarious times are not, in fact, unprecedented. Editorship is an opportunity to use the long historical record of JSI as a resource to elevate classic and under-cited papers that offer insight into the present moment, including theoretical and methodological issues in applied social research. As co-editors, we intend to:

• Speak directly to the membership just as we’re doing now by writing a column in the SPSSI newsletter that updates our community on the status of the Journal, including key metrics and calls for future special issues.
• Consistent with our work on “public” (Eaton et al., 2021), “bad” (Grzanka & Cole, 2021), and intersectional psychology (Cole, 2009; Grzanka, 2020), we will set expectations as editors that issue guest editors and their authors substantively and thoroughly address (policy) implications and applications of their research. Keeping with the SPSSI tradition, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s landmark argument for the psychology of maladjustment (in JSI, 1968), we will ask editors/authors to consider how psychology should change to better actualize positive social transformation–not just suggest changes to or in the structures and communities we study. All scholars publishing in JSI will be explicitly asked to consider in their manuscripts how their work might have translational impact (broadly construed).

Finally, we view the editorial board as an essential component of the journal’s and SPSSI’s near- and long-term success. The editorial board represents that braintrust to shepherd JSI’s intellectual contributions and to maintain the academic integrity of SPSSI and its reputation more broadly. We aim to energize the board in order to: 1) to maintain the highest levels of quality in our published manuscripts, and 2) to sustain a pipeline of future JSI leaders and guest editors. The editorial board will bring a broad range of expertise across the discipline and we will draw upon them routinely to provide perspectives on special issue proposals, guest editor introductions, and manuscripts.

JSI board members have relevant experience, of course, and they represent a variety of career stages and backgrounds so that input on the journal’s publications contains multiple perspectives–including those that are typically underrepresented and marginalized in mainstream psychology. Following recent practices by other well-regarded psychology journals, we anticipate appointing up to two editorial fellows who have recently earned the Ph.D. and are interested in gaining editorial experience.

We are humbled to be the next co-editors and so honored to accept this tremendous responsibility. We are grateful to outgoing editor Dr. Martin Ruck, in particular, for steering JSI to its present success and to the entire editorial board for their service to JSI and to SPSSI. In a moment that feels like constant crisis, we are invigorated by the challenge and responsibility of continuing the legacy of JSI’s greatness.

We are looking forward to collaborating with you; please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with your ideas.

—Liz and Patrick