A Message from the JMCD Editor

My Vision for JMCD

Currently at my Multicultural Center for Research and Practice at Antioch University New England, I am doing practice-based research. I am very interested in guiding JMCD towards practice-based multicultural process and outcome research. This genre of research will, for example, include:

case studies and their analyses from a theoretical framework, including the framework of multicultural counseling competencies;
clients' feedback and effectiveness evaluations of counseling;
community and stakeholder involvement in programming and feedback;
and community outreach to those who underutilize services.

I will include multicultural program development and evaluations. I will invite writings in the area of multicultural “best practices” by practitioners who subject their work to objective examination. I will also invite writings that address culturally relevant, empirically supported treatment. My specialization in measurement and assessment makes me very interested in the assessment of clinical and diagnostic biases. In multicultural counseling, we are at an early stage of recognizing and understanding culture-bound mental health issues and their respective culturally relevant treatments. JMCD could provide leadership in this newly evolving mental health knowledge base. I would like to see JMCD address issues of terrorism and related sociopolitical, religious, and spiritual responses. The mental health concerns of immigrants and international clients are also important to me, and I would like JMCD to cover these issues as well.

JMCD is devoted to racial, ethnic, and cultural minority concerns. Minority contexts and identities need solidification and expansion through scholarship. Potential topic areas for the journal include the interface of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans with diverse societal and contextual experiences, such as:

oppression, racism, and discrimination;
worldview values orientation;
and class, socioeconomic status, education, affirmative action, gender role, sexual orientation, religion, spirituality, age, and ability status.

The interface, tension, and eventual balance between an individual's personal identity and social identity/identities need to be addressed, so that multicultural scholarship does not propagate racial and ethnic stereotypes. I want multicultural counseling to address racial and ethnic minority children, adolescents, the elderly, and those with disabilities - the underserved people within minority societies.

All of the above topic areas, moreover, must have a theoretical grounding; articles need to address the theoretical underpinnings of their reported projects. Thus JMCD may help in distilling specific multicultural theories and possibly be involved in the development of an integrative meta-multicultural theory along the lines of humanistic or relationship theories.

Gargi Roysircar
Editor, JMCD

Last Updated: 7/24/09