ADR Advisor Dr. Julia Wai-Yin So is Professor of Sociology at UNM-Valencia and a scholar/practitioner of inclusive pedagogy. She also consults on DEI initiatives and program evaluations.
Before moving to New Mexico, Julia worked for the Dallas College in Texas where she successfully expanded a $30-million privately-funded endowed scholarship program county-wide. She is a past President of the Texas Diversity Council and a past board chair of the Asian Chamber of Texas.
Julia’s passion is to raise one’s cultural competence of those that look and speak differently from them. In her free time, she volunteers at the Bernalillo Metropolitan County Court as a certified mediator and answers the crisis/suicide hotline for a local crisis center.
The nation is crying out for universal health care reform to provide adequate health insurance for the diverse citizens in the nation. Yet, American diversity includes a group of individuals who remain silent as they continue to face limited access to health care because of their limited English proficiency (LEP). A study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation in April, 2008 indicated that during 2004-2006 almost one third of non-elderly Korean Americans in the US do not have health insurance.
To many of us, the idea of using two sticks with one hand to pick up a piece of chicken or vegetable from a plate or bowl and putting that same piece of chicken or vegetable into our mouth without dropping it is beyond one’s imagination. However, this is what one out of every five people in the world does at mealtime on a daily basis. These people with such dexterity with chopsticks live in what we call “chopsticks nations” such as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
