Yuk-Lin Renita Wong

Professor Yuk-Lin Renita Wong’s scholarship and teaching aim at deconstructing the power relations in the knowledge production and discursive practices of social work as well as re-centering marginalized voices and ways of knowing and being. She brings contemplative pedagogy into critical social work education and takes up mindfulness practice as a pedagogy of decolonization and as critical reflective practice that nurtures awareness and wholeness in social justice work. She has been a mindfulness practitioner since 1998 and leads meditation and mindfulness training in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Alongside her academic life is her community service in end-of-life care. She has co-developed the Compassionate Care Program under the Buddhist Education Network of Ontario to provide hospice volunteer training and service for Chinese-speaking clients in palliative/hospice care and their families.

Representative Publications
Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita. 2018. “‘Please call me by my true names’: The decolonizing pedagogy of mindfulness and interbeing in critical social work education.” In Sharing breath: Embodied learning and decolonization, edited by Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong, 253-277. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press.

Ku, Hok Bun and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong. 2018. “State, profession, and religion: Reflecting on spirituality and indigenous social work in China in the Yushu earthquake relief.” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work 37(2): 146-165.

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita. 2013. “Returning to silence, connecting to wholeness: Contemplative pedagogy for critical social work education.” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work 32 (3): 269-285.

Long, Di and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong. 2012. “Time bound: The timescape of secondary trauma among the surviving teachers of the Wenchuan Earthquake.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 82 (2): 241-250.

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita, Yuk Ki Timothy Leung, and Choi Wan Dorcas Lau. 2009. “Behind the allure of gambling: A qualitative exploration of the existential yearnings among Chinese men with problem gambling.” International Gambling Studies 9 (3): 189-205.

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita and Jana Vinsky. 2009. “Speaking from the margins: A critical reflection on the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ discourse in social work.” British Journal of Social Work 39 (7): 1343-1359.

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita, 2004. “Knowing through discomfort: A mindfulness-based critical social work pedagogy.” Critical Social Work 5 (1). http://www1.uwindsor.ca/criticalsocialwork/knowing-through-discomfort-a-mindfulness-based-critical-social-work-pedagogy

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita. 2004. “When East meets West: Nation, colony, and Hong Kong women's subjectivities in gender and China-development.” Modern China 30 (2): 259-292.

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita. 2003. “Deconstructing culture in cultural competence: Dissenting voices from Asian-Canadian practitioners.” Canadian Social Work Review 20 (2): 149-167.