The Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development

Call for Papers: Special Issue on School Counseling

Submission deadline: December 1, 2026

Guest Editors: Robert R. Martinez Jr., PhD (William & Mary) (rrmartinez@wm.edu) and Carlos P. Hipolito-Delgado, PhD (University of Colorado Denver) (carlos.hipolito@ucdenver.edu)

The Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development (JMCD) is publishing a special issue entitled “Refusing the Racial Equity Detour: Recentering School Counseling on Students and Systemically Vulnerable Communities in a Time of Retrenchment.” The guest editors, Robert R. Martinez Jr., PhD (William & Mary) and Carlos P. Hipolito-Delgado, PhD (University of Colorado Denver) seek manuscripts that reexamine the purpose, theories, and practices of school counseling which has long failed to address the needs of children of color and at a moment when equity-centered work is under political attack. We are especially interested in manuscripts that move school counseling beyond the narrow college-access mandate toward culturally sustaining personal/social development, the overall quality of school life and well-being of students from marginalized communities, and authentic collaboration with families, educators, and community systems.

School counselors are uniquely positioned to advance educational equity, yet both the nested systems in which they practice and, at times, counselors’ own preparation, beliefs, and, in some cases, intentions are not aligned with the needs of students of color (Merlin-Knoblich et al., 2025; Savitz-Romer & Nicola, 2021). Our current sociopolitical reality has intensified these misalignments. Aggressive immigration enforcement has reverberated through schools, affecting immigrant-origin and citizen students alike and eroding the conditions for an equitable education (Da Silva Iddings & Warraich, 2022; Ee & Gándara, 2019). Anti-DEI legislation, curricular censorship, book bans, and the contested politics of youth and gender identity have turned schools into a battleground and have made the school counseling profession itself a target (Johnson et al., 2022). Across this landscape, the field’s professional language around equity and social justice has grown muted, raising a pointed question: is school counseling recentering its commitments to students and systemically vulnerable communities, or quietly retreating from them?

We take as our diagnostic lens Gorski’s (2019) concept of the racial equity detour: the strategies, well-intentioned or otherwise, that create the illusion of progress while leaving inequity intact. We pair it with Bell’s (1980) interest-convergence thesis, the observation that gains for systemically vulnerable groups tend to be tolerated chiefly when they also serve dominant-group interests, as elaborated for education by Milner (2008). We extend these lenses with Guinier’s (2004) racial literacy, the capacity to read the durable racial grammar that structures schooling, and her companion notion of interest divergence, which together help explain how muted or coded equity language can keep oppressive arrangements in school counseling intact. We invite authors to utilize innovative and culturally responsive frameworks alongside the frames school counselors already work in — dignity, overall quality of life, dehumanization, racism, and ableism — so that the conversation extends past “equity” and “social justice” as terms of art (Ratts et al., 2016) to the conditions students actually live with. Read together, these lenses press an uncomfortable question for a profession whose workforce is predominantly White female, a racial and gendered composition that itself shapes whose interests school counseling reads as its own: when school counseling embraces “equity,” whom does that embrace ultimately serve, and what is abandoned when the political winds shift? This special issue invites scholarship that refuses the detour and names interest convergence where it operates.

Refusing the detour requires more than statements; it requires moving school counseling beyond a narrow college-access mandate, one that measures success in application counts and matriculation rates and leaves dignity, mental health, school climate, and family relationships outside the role. Refusing the detour requires us to think of the whole student and to embrace our training as advocates for students from marginalized communities. It also requires frameworks adequate to the communities’ school counselors serve (Rutledge & Smith-Durkin, 2025). Too often, practice rests on deficit narratives that locate problems in students and families rather than in systems (Martinez & Carrillo, 2026). We seek work grounded instead in the strengths, knowledge, and community cultural wealth of systemically vulnerable communities (Yosso, 2005), and we particularly embrace frameworks indigenous to the communities being discussed, conceptual resources developed by and within those communities rather than imported and applied to them. Established scholarly traditions are welcome but not required entry points, provided they are placed in service of, and not substituted for, frameworks

Finally, we invite scholarship that meets the present moment with practical specificity. School counselors increasingly function as street-level actors interpreting law and policy for vulnerable students, often without adequate training or institutional support (Lauby & Cuautle, 2025; Lauby & Ross, 2022), even as students weigh the risks of disclosing immigration status in a climate of fear (Valdivia et al., 2025). Manuscripts may be empirical or conceptual, but each must explicitly advance equity-centered, justice-oriented, or liberatory aims for students and systemically vulnerable communities. To ensure the issue speaks with both rigor and immediacy, we encourage theoretically grounded, publication-ready submissions; purely descriptive literature reviews without a clear conceptual or justice-oriented contribution will not be considered. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Reckoning with the historical participation of school counseling in oppressive practices, and charting a path forward;
• Critical analyses of shifts in the field’s equity and social justice language, including in ASCA standards, accreditation criteria, professional-association position statements, and state policy, and what muted, recoded, or rolled-back language reveals about the direction of school counseling;
• Interest convergence and the “social justice of convenience” in school counseling: for example, equity initiatives that advance when they also serve dominant-group interests (admissions optics, district funding, accreditation) and recede when they do not;
• Frameworks that challenge deficit narratives, center the strengths, culture, and knowledge of systemically vulnerable communities, and document measurable impact on student well-being and school conditions;
• Culturally sustaining approaches to personal/social development and student mental health;
• The overall quality of school life and well-being of students of color and students with disabilities, beyond college access and college readiness alone;
• School counselor collaboration with families, educators, and community systems to address collective harm;
• School counseling and immigration enforcement, including support for undocumented and mixed-status students and families;
• Civil rights, legislation, and state-level advocacy in school counseling practice;
• Centering authentic student voice in times of political repression, including youth participatory action research in which students serve as co-researchers rather than only as research participants (Watts et al., 2003);
• Navigating threats and perceived threats to youth and gender identity, including the use and misuse of Title IX and civil rights enforcement;
• Exclusionary discipline (suspension and expulsion) and the school counselor’s role in identifying, interrupting, and addressing racial, disability, and intersectional disparities in discipline outcomes;
• The role of artificial intelligence in school counseling, including algorithmic bias in college and career advising tools, risk-screening and early-warning systems, and the implications of automated decision-making for students of color, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.

Submission and Review

Authors should follow the JMCD Author Guidelines and submit their manuscripts through the JMCD submission portal, noting that the submission is for this special issue. Each manuscript will undergo a blind review process. In addition to full-length manuscripts, brief reports (up to 3,000 words) are welcome for emerging and time-sensitive topics.

The timeline for publication is as follows:

• September 15, 2026: Call for papers released
• December 1, 2026: Full-length manuscripts due (brief reports may be submitted by November 1, 2026)
• January 30, 2027: Blind review completed and editorial decisions made
• March 1, 2027: Required manuscript edits submitted
• May 1, 2027: Final approval of JMCD Board and Editor
• July 1, 2027: Articles published in advance online and print form

For additional information or questions, please contact the guest editors. Their email addresses are linked from their names above.

References

Bell, D. A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518–533. https://doi.org/10.2307/1340546

Da Silva Iddings, A. C., & Warraich, A. K. (2022). Facilitating educational equity and safety of undocumented immigrant students. Urban Education, 59(2), 520–547. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420859221082672

Ee, J., & Gándara, P. (2019). The impact of immigration enforcement on the nation’s schools. American Educational Research Journal, 57(2), 840–871. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219862998

Gorski, P. C. (2019). Avoiding racial equity detours. Educational Leadership, 76(7), 56–61.

Guinier, L. (2004). From racial liberalism to racial literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-divergence dilemma. The Journal of American History, 91(1), 92–118. https://doi.org/10.2307/3659616

Johnson, K. F., Brookover, D. L., & Gantt-Howrey, A. (2022). Antiracism internship: Applying the ecological social justice school counseling theory. Counselor Education and Supervision, 61(2), 185–202. https://doi.org/10.1002/ceas.12253

Lauby, F., & Cuautle, J. (2025). School counselors and knowledge of immigrant policy: Variation by location and voter preference. Politics & Policy, 53(5). https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.70091

Lauby, F., & Ross, K. (2022). Street-level immigrant policy implementation: The role of school counselors. Law & Policy, 44(4), 348–366. https://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12198

Martinez, R. R., & Carrillo, F. J. (2026). Beyond ecological neutrality: A LatCrit, Borderlands, and Community Cultural Wealth framework for school counselors working with undocumented Latinx students. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 54(3), 131–139. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmcd.70027

Merlin-Knoblich, C., Graham, B., & Clark, S. C. (2025). An exploration of the impact of the School Counseling Equity Fellowship on school counselors. Journal of Counseling & Development, 103(4), 442–456. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12566

Milner, H. R. (2008). Critical race theory and interest convergence as analytic tools in teacher education policies and practices. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(4), 332–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487108321884

Ratts, M. J., Singh, A. A., Nassar-McMillan, S., Butler, S. K., & McCullough, J. R. (2016). Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies: Guidelines for the counseling profession. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 44(1), 28–48. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmcd.12035

Rutledge, M. L., & Smith-Durkin, S. (2025). Antiracist school counseling advocacy framework. Professional School Counseling, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2156759X251340047

Savitz-Romer, M., & Nicola, T. P. (2021). An ecological examination of school counseling equity. The Urban Review, 54(2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-021-00618-x

Valdivia, C., Clark-Ibáñez, M., & Patten, I. (2025). Fear and stigma: How undocumented students navigate disclosure amid heightened immigration enforcement and rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Sociological Perspectives, 68(1–3), 123–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/07311214251336454

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006

Call for Papers: Advancing Quantitative Approaches to Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Counseling

Submission deadline: October 30, 2026

Guest Editor: Dr. Janeé Steele, Walden University (email: janee.steele@mail.waldenu.edu)

The Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development (JMCD), the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD), a division of the American Counseling Association, invites manuscript submissions for a special issue focused on the innovative use of quantitative methodologies in research on race, ethnicity, and culture, with a primary emphasis on race and ethnicity as key parts of the research questions, design, and analysis.

Rationale for the Special Issue

Quantitative research plays an essential role in advancing understanding of race, ethnicity, and culture by allowing scholars to examine patterns, mechanisms, disparities, and outcomes across individuals, groups, and systems (Balkin & Kleist, 2023; Kalkbrenner, 2022). When designed with cultural intentionality, quantitative approaches can illuminate how racialized experiences, structural inequities, and sociopolitical contexts shape mental health and human development (Cokley & Awad, 2013; Quintana et al., 2001; Suzuki et al., 2021; Weller, 2025).

Despite this potential, quantitative research on race and ethnicity has often struggled to reflect lived realities, including how people experience and make meaning of their racial and ethnic identities and how researchers define, identify, and categorize the populations being studied. For example, scholars have long noted that race is frequently treated as a demographic category or proxy variable rather than distinguished from related psychological constructs such as racial identity attitudes, acculturation, or experiences of racism, leading to interpretations that obscure cultural meaning and context (Quintana et al., 2001). Conventional quantitative designs have also relied heavily on decontextualized group comparisons that fail to account for the salience, centrality, or lived significance of race and ethnicity for individuals, thereby limiting the ability to examine how racism and structural conditions shape outcomes (Cokley & Awad, 2013; Fischer & Moradi, 2001). As a result, important questions about race and ethnicity may be simplified, overlooked, or framed in ways that reinforce deficit-oriented interpretations.

This special issue seeks to advance the field by showcasing rigorous, innovative, and culturally grounded quantitative methodologies that meaningfully engage race, ethnicity, and culture rather than treating them as peripheral or purely demographic variables. We are particularly interested in applied examples that demonstrate how quantitative approaches can be used to generate culturally meaningful knowledge, inform counseling practice and training, and contribute to equity-oriented policy and systems-level change.

Scope of the Special Issue

JMCD welcomes manuscripts, from all disciplines that focus on counseling, that employ quantitative designs to examine race, ethnicity, and culture in counseling and human development. Submissions should move beyond describing statistical techniques and instead clearly articulate how methodological choices align with culturally responsive research aims and theoretical frameworks.

We are not seeking simple literature reviews of quantitative methods or generic overviews of analytic techniques. Manuscripts should emphasize application, innovation, and critical engagement with quantitative methodology in the context of racial and ethnic research.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Measurement challenges related to within-group heterogeneity

• Quantitative approaches to measuring racial and ethnic identity, centrality, and salience

• Cultural validity and interpretation of scores across racial and ethnic groups

• Modeling the effects of racism, discrimination, and structural inequities

• Quantitative studies that meaningfully inform culturally responsive counseling practice and training

• Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit)

• Addressing race and ethnicity in grants, or program evaluation

• How dissertation chairs can provide guidance on doctoral students can address race and ethnicity in Counseling

Authors should follow JMCD Author guidelines and submit manuscripts through the JMCD Wiley Authors submission platform, clearly indicating that their submission is for this special issue. Each manuscript will undergo a blind review process.

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Janeé Steele
Associate Editor, JMCD Walden University United States

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: "Is this submission for a special issue?" by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.

The timeline for publication is as follows:

• October 30, 2026: Full-length manuscript due
• December 15, 2026: Feedback and manuscript status provided to authors by JMCD Editorial Board (traditional blind review) and guest editor

For additional information or questions, please contact the special issue editor or the Editor-in-Chief of JMCD Dr. Carla Adkison-Johnson (Email: cadkison-johnson@uky.edu).

References

Balkin, R. S., & Kleist, D. M. (2023). Introduction to research in counseling. American Counseling Association.

Cokley, K., & Awad, G. H. (2013). In defense of quantitative methods: Using the “master’s tools” to promote social justice. Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 5(2), 26–41. https://openjournals.bsu.edu/jsacp/article/view/487

Fischer, A. R., & Moradi, B. (2001). Racial and ethnic identity: Recent developments and needed directions. In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (2nd ed., pp. 341–370). Sage Publications.

Kalkbrenner, M. T. (2022). Guidelines and recommendations for writing a rigorous quantitative methods section in counseling and related fields. The Professional Counselor, 12(3), 217–231. https://doi.org/10.15241/mtk.12.3.217

Quintana, S. M., Troyano, N., & Taylor, G. (2001). Cultural validity and inherent challenges in quantitative methods for multicultural research. In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (2nd ed., pp. 604–630). Sage Publications.

Suzuki, S., Morris, S. L., & Johnson, S. K. (2021). Using QuantCrit to advance an anti-racist developmental science: Applications to mixture modeling. Journal of Adolescent Research, 36(5), 535–560. https://doi.org/10.1177/07435584211028229

Weller, B. E. (2025). Latent class analysis: A statistical approach for advancing research on race and culture. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmcd.12316