Welcome to the first newsletter of 2023. This is a newsletter of firsts. The first newsletter of the new year, my first newsletter column as the president of Division 1, and Lori’s first newsletter as a solo editor.
At the start of a new year, most of us are looking forward and thinking about changes we want to make over the upcoming year. What better time of year then, to be sharing some of the changes that are happening in our division? Since I started my tenure as Division 1 President in August, the Division 1 Executive Committee (EC) has submitted paperwork to officially change the name of Division 1 from The Society for General Psychology to The Society for General Psychology and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. The EC also voted to form an investment committee and put them to work right away, overseeing the stock market investment of division funds that had been languishing in a bank account. Investing this money (in ethically responsible companies of course) will ensure that we are able to remain on firm financial footing and will help support division activities. And while I’m on the subject of division activities, we have been working on plans to spend some of the division’s funds on you, the members. We are in the process of developing free workshops and programming for members that we will launch later this year and will be hosting social events that we hope you’ll attend at the APA convention in August.
This new year will also see us building a new and more engaging website full of useful information and resources for our members. And finally, we are in the process of hiring an administrative officer for the division, someone who will be able to help us with important administrative tasks and who will be able to support some of our new, big visions for the division. One of my many visions for the division is looking at Division 1’s track record in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion and actively improving it. We plan to take strides to live our values, as outlined in Past-President Jocelyn Turner-Musa’s Diversity Statement that was adopted by the Division, and are working on developing programming and resources relevant to psychologists of color. Alex Onuoha has joined us to spearhead these efforts.
I want us to think big in terms of what we can do as a division, but I also want us to be thinking big in terms of what we can do as general and interdisciplinary psychologists. My presidential theme that will be highlighted at the conference is Using Big Ideas to Unify Psychology. What do I mean by this? Time and space in which people can work on developing big or new ideas or theories in psychology has become increasingly hard to come by. Those of us who are academics are trapped in a cycle of publish or perish that demands us to work quickly, and I would argue, shallowly, so that we can produce the prolific amounts of work demanded of us by academic institutions and granting institutions. This work tends to be largely quantitative empirical work. This type of work is important for our discipline, but it cannot be all that our discipline produces. Those of us in practice or other applied work may find ourselves needing to take on more and more clients to meet the needs of people subsumed by the mental health crisis that started before, but was certainly exacerbated by, the pandemic. Similarly, those of us who teach, may find ourselves burning out under the relentlessness of students’ pastoral needs, again, that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Where, in all of this busyness, is there time to stop and think, and be creative in our work? How can we encourage a new generation of theorists—theorists who are diverse both in terms of identity and thought—to think big and develop new ideas to shape the future of psychology, if we are not providing people with the time to do this? It is a lofty goal, but I want to encourage all of us to think about how we can make space in our careers, and support others in making space in their careers, to allow for the percolation of big ideas. General and interdisciplinary psychology, with its commitment to building connections between the subspecialities of psychology and other disciplines is the perfect place to start this conversation. So as we start the new year, perhaps allow yourself some time and some space in your work calendar to think big, not just about your own life and career, but about our larger discipline, looking for connections or gaps in our knowledge. Where should we be building or developing new or better theories? What shifts in perspectives or approaches to how we think about and/or do psychological science or practice can we propose? Our science is a living, breathing thing, and while I recognize that the systems we are a part of seldom leave space for deep thinking, I hope that many of you will be able to find that space in 2023 to devote to exploring some of your big ideas.