SPSSI Forward Newsletter Editor
Kala J. Melchiori
Hello SPSSI colleagues! I’m Dr. Kala Melchiori, a white, working-class, cisgender woman and parent to two children. I grew up in rural West Virginia and received my BA in Psychology with a minor in Women’s Studies from Marshall University in Huntington, WV. I received my PhD in Social Psychology with a concentration in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies from Loyola University Chicago in 2015.
Social justice work touches each facet of my career. At James Madison University, my undergraduate and graduate students and I explore questions about how people respond to prejudice and discrimination, how to frame confrontations to be effective and avoid backlash, and what motivates pro-environmental behavior. In the classroom, I incorporate DEI into my Research Methods course by leading students through research projects focused on intergroup helping. I also teach several sociocultural courses for my department, including the Psychology of Gender and Psychology of Prejudice. I have published work on strategies instructors can use to introduce and apply social justice topics in the classroom. I have served as a member in my college’s Inclusive Excellence Committee, co-initiated a Diversity Reading Group in my department, served on JMU’s DEI Curriculum Task Force, and created and facilitated workshops on identifying and responding to bias for department- and college-wide audiences as well as community groups.
SPSSI has been my “home” professional organization since I attended my first SPSSI conference as an undergraduate in 2008 - shout out to my advisor, past SPSSI president Wendy Williams, for bringing me to the conference! Since then, I have sought out opportunities to serve SPSSI. I was the Graduate Student Chair from 2011-2013; during my tenure, the graduate student committee and I organized a stand-alone Graduate Student Professional Development Conference in Washington, DC. I also served on the editorial board of SPSSI’s Journal of Social Issues from 2013-2016. In 2018, Harmony Reppond and I served as SPSSI at APA conference planning co-chairs. Most recently, I served as co-chair (with Eduardo A. Lugo Hernández and Souhail M. Malavé Rivera) for the SPSSI 2022 conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Forward is an exciting chance to continue serving SPSSI’s mission to encourage public education and social activism on social issues.
My record of service to SPSSI has done a great deal to teach me about collaboration, coalition building, and doing the work with a social justice-oriented community of scholars. I look forward (pun intended) to continued collaborations with our diverse, skilled, vibrant, and DEI mission-driven SPSSI community.