Dwaine Plaza

Oregon State University | OSU · Department of Sociology

Despite being separated by great geographical distances, the Trinidadian Diaspora community has managed to stay in regular communication with those back “home” using the latest available technologies. Trinidadian migrants living abroad have established multi-directional care chains with family, kin, and friends that have endured for decades. This s...

Despite having made a number of positive steps to advance diversity and provide support for women scientist in the past ten years, STEM research institutions continue to be an environment where women faculty face a kind of “patriarchal DNA” that treats women scientists as subordinate to men. An environment continues to exist where women faculty oft...

Studies on the persistence and success of underrepresented groups in STEM point to a number of challenges, ranging from college-preparedness to lack of role models and financial disparity. However, few studies, if any, systematically investigate the role students' individual identities (i.e. intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, abilit...

Using data collected from a non-random electronic survey of (N=116) Trinidadian origin men and women and data gleaned from a content analysis of roti shop websites on the Internet (n=80). This paper examines how the Trinidadian diaspora currently residing in places like New York, Toronto or London's are influenced by their early food socialization...

Despite being separated by great geographical distances, the transnational Caribbean community has managed to stay in regular communication with those in the "home" country using the latest available technologies. The preliminary findings of this exploratory study suggest that new media (Facebook, Skype, and YouTube) facilitate multi-directional ca...

In 2000 there were an estimated 451million Internet users worldwide, which represented 7. 4 percent of the world's population.1 By 2006 the number of users had jumped to one and a half billion, or approximately 25 percent of the world's population. The growth in Internet use between 2000 and 2006 has been especially dramatic in certain parts of the...

Using a transnational theoretical framework we examine the factors which have been involved in the emergence of a return migration culture in the English-speaking Caribbean since 1834. Caribbean emigration and return is not a simplistic bipolar movement, rather the flow is best understood as a fluid looping process which has some backflow. This pap...

Using data from life history interviews collected from a 2000 Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement–funded research project, this article examines the role that family, the community, and the environment have played in the identity formation of one-and-a-half-generation and second-generation Indo-Caribbean and African Cari...

We discuss our experience using an action-learning model to teach an interdisciplinary field course about the complex cross-cultural issues Native American populations face in Oregon today. This approach took students out of the traditional post-secondary classroom setting for 1 week and emphasized learning through active listening and the creation...

Using the 1996 Public Use Microfiche files of the Canadian Census and life story data from 30 cases collected from a 1998 CERIS-funded research project, this article disaggregates the migration and settlement story for Indoand African-Caribbean migrants living in Canada. Findings from this research suggest that a significant difference exists in th...

During March 2002 Oregon State University students took a non-traditional approach to learning about cross-cultural issues in Native America. The students lived five days in Burns, Oregon interacting with the Burns Paiute Tribe and non-Indian community stakeholders, thereby developing an understanding of the complex issues facing Oregon's Native Am...

This paper explores the role and position of grandmothers in African-Caribbean families resident in Britain. The data used for this paper comes fromm a sample of 180 life-history interviews collected in 1995–1996 from three generations of Caribbean-origin people living in Britain and the Caribbean. Findings from this research suggest that African-C...

We examined the nature and content of 150 randomly selected pornographic images available in Usenet newsgroups on the Internet in April 1994. Using content analysis, we identified themes that appear most frequently and explored differences in the type of material posted by commercial and noncommercial users. Results suggest that commercial vendors...

Using a methodology of content analysis of Internet Websites constructed by second generation Caribbeans in the United States, Canada and Great Britain (n=50), this article reveals how websites act as a symbolic bridge that connects familiar Creole cultural values and practices with the second generations' feelings of object loss and cultural mourn...

Synopsis This research has examined the employment experiences and mobility of second-generation Caribbean men and women who completed post secondary schooling in Canada. The findings suggest that second-generation Caribbean-origin men and women have adapted to Canada according to a segmented assimilation model. For the most part this has meant bec...