Joseph So

Professor Emeritus

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Education

BA, MA, PhD (SUNY)

Research Interests

Medical anthropology, in the areas of psychiatric epidemiology, focusing on migration, ethnicity and health among migrant populations.

Profile

Professor So took his degrees at the State University of New York at Buffalo (B.A. in Psychology and M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology). He was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba before joining the Anthropology Department of Trent University in 1975. He retired in 2008.

Trained as a biological anthropologist, Prof. So's current research interest is in medical anthropology, in the areas of psychiatric epidemiology, focusing on migration, ethnicity and health among migrant populations. He has done fieldwork in a psychiatric clinic in Suzhou, China, investigating the use of traditional medicine in treating psychiatric and psychological disorders.

He is a consulting medical anthropologist and board member at Hong Fook Mental Health Service, a Ministry of Health funded, community-based mental health agency that serves several ethnocultural communities in the Greater Toronto Area. He has been involved in the development of resource material on cultural competence for health care professionals, and mental health promotion material as part of ethnocultural communities outreach programs. Prof. So has also organized several mental health conferences.

Active in community volunteerism, Prof. So has received two Volunteer Service Awards from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture. Prof. So was the coordinator of the first year Introductory Anthropology course. He also taught upper year courses in Medical Anthropology, Primate Behavior, Biocultural Explorations of the Human Lifecourse, and Anthropology of Race and Racism.

Representative publications include "Cancer Mortality of Chinese Canadians in Ontario 1964-1977: A Study in Descriptive Epidemiology" in Canadian Review of Physical Anthropology (1988, Vol. 6, no. 2: 22-30); "Migration, Ethnicity, and Health: Anthropological Approaches in Epidemiology" in Strength in Diversity: Reader in Physical Anthropology, ed. A. Herring and L. Chan (Canadian Scholar's Press, 1994); and "Traditional and Cultural Healing among the Chinese: implications in psychotherapy and counseling", in Integrating Traditional and Cultural Healing in Counseling and Psychotherapy, eds. Roy Moodley and William West (Sage 2004).