Newsletter
Volume 30 | 2007| Number 2
Behaviorists for Social Responsibility
By Dr. Mark Mattaini and Richard Rakos
The mission of Behaviorists for Social Responsibility (BFSR) is to act to expand applications of behavior analysis and cultural analysis addressing social issues, particularly those with social justice, human rights, and environmental implications. This is clearly an ambitious mission, and a critically important one. At the same time, the number of behavior analysts whose primary scholarship or practice is in these areas is very small. Many behavior analysts make contributions to justice, human rights and environmental action in their own ways, but the aggregate level of scientific behavior dedicated to these efforts remains quite modest, and may in fact be declining as the result of increasing demand in other areas like autism and other developmental disabilities. At the same time, the extent of human and environmental problems is not noticeably declining, and in some cases (e.g., global warming) is clearly escalating.
Given this context, the goals of BFSR include the following:
1) To make increasingly rigorous behavior science accessible worldwide through our open access journal, Behavior and Social Issues (www.behaviorandsocialissues.org);
2) To ensure attention to social and environmental issues on the annual ABA convention program;
3) To promote networking among behavior and cultural analysts with social interests; and
4) To encourage expansion and specification of the science of cultural analysis, which are essential to addressing social issues.
Behavior and Social Issues is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that serves as a primary scholarly outlet for articles that advance the analysis of human social behavior, particularly with regard to understanding and influencing important social problems. The journal is particularly committed to publishing work related to issues with social justice, human rights, and environmental implications, but all significant social issues are of interest.
Over the past year, we have stabilized online access to Behavior and Social Issues through a partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago Library, as part of an international network of open access journals using Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs), based at Simon Fraser University in Canada. While the journal now has a reasonable backlog of accepted articles, additional high-quality submissions are important to support both the first and the fourth identified goal areas. Appropriate contributions include theoretical and conceptual analyses, research articles and brief reports, dialogues, research reviews, and book reviews. Subscriptions that support the print version of the journal are also always needed (please see the Website for subscription information).
Related to the second goal area, BFSR members are presenting a number of sessions at ABA 2007, and are organizing to expand these efforts at ABA 2008. BFSR maintains a listserv in an effort to support networking (the third goal area noted above). This listserv has generated only very limited behavior, however, and we are currently forming a task group to explore ways to expand such networking. All members of ABA are encouraged to contact us through our Website (www.bfsr.org) to become involved in these efforts!