2022 Presidential Initiative: Finding our Values & Facing the Public

Ryon C. McDermott, Ph.D.,
2022 Division 51 President

Two Core Aims

I am honored to be the 2022 President of D51. Since my time in the office as President Elect, and now as the 2022 President, I have gotten to know many new and older members of the division, and some exciting new opportunities have become available. Therefore, I am excited to officially unveil my presidential initiative, which has two main goals:

(1) identifying and codifying our professional values as a division and

(2) making our science more accessible to the public.

Our Values

What does it mean to study the psychology of men and masculinities or to engage in psychological practice with men and boys? Why do we do this work?

These are a few of the questions I hope to answer and to codify into an official values statement. To do this, I will be developing a task force of psychologists, graduate students, and faculty researchers in the division. My hope is that a clear values statement will help advance us toward more values-congruent actions. If we have a shared understanding of the heart and soul of D51, then we can focus our energy toward engaging in work that moves us forward toward our strategic goals.

Getting our Knowledge Out to the Public

If you go on YouTube right now and search for “masculinity”, you will have to wade through numerous videos full of misinformation (either intentional or unintentional). You will also notice that we have a near zero presence on this platform. I aim to change this.

Specifically, animation software has come a long way over the years, and I plan to leverage this technology to create short, animated videos, as well as brief informational clips focused on a variety of topics commonly studied in our field (see below). Some of these will be a series and broken up into several smaller videos, as the goal is to keep these videos down to a short and digestible level.