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DWAINE PLAZA Profile by Gabriela Agatiello
EDUARDO CANEL
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CERLAC fellow LIISA NORTH wins 2005 Pio Jaramillo Alvarado Award
CERLAC extends heartfelt congratulations to Fellow Liisa North, a most deserving recipient of this prized honour.
The international and interinstitutional jury has granted the 2005 Pio Jaramillo Alvarado Award to Doctor Liisa North, Professor Emeritus of York University, Canada, for her significant contributions to knowledge of Latin American societies, and especially Ecuadorian society. Congratulations Liisa! See the profile on Liisa North in the 2002/2003 CERLAC Review.
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FELLOWS UPDATE
Judith Bernhard continues to work on a collaborative research project on social cohesion in international migration with CERLAC Fellows Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt. She is also investigating the Early Authors Program as a form of Multiple Literacies.
Cathy Blacklock is a co-investigator of the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative project “Globalization and Autonomy” directed by William Coleman, based at McMaster University where she is working on “Regional Economic Integration: the New Phase/Face of Globalization?” She is also currently working on a paper entitled “Why Does Neoliberal Restructuring ‘Hang’ Together? Women, Gender and Social Cohesion in Latin America.”
Meyer Brownstone continues to work with Oxfam Canada in the development of food and trade policy and is also involved with the Toronto Food Policy Committee. He has written unpublished reports on land reform and localization, and urban and peri-urban agriculture.
Max Cameron was appointed the Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professor at Yale University in the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and began his affiliation with Yale in fall 2005.
Frederick I. Case was recently appointed Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. He also continues his work as Co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions.
Matt Davies has taken a new position as a Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne where he will continue his research in International Political Economy, Culture and the Critique of Everyday Life, and Latin American labour movements and politics.
Juanita De Barros continues in her role as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at McMaster University and is currently working on Medicine on the Edge of Civilization: Creole Doctors in the Post-Slavery British Caribbean.
Carol Duncan was recently appointed Chair in the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she was also recently awarded both the Wilfrid Laurier University Award for Teaching Excellence and the Faculty of Arts Teaching Scholar Award in 2004. She serves as an Executive Committee Member for the Black Religious Scholars Group of the American Academy of Religion and for the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and is on the Advisory Board of Resources for Feminist Research. She continues as co-investigator for “Being Black/Teaching Black: An African-American Dialogue Concerning the Influences of Blackness in Theological Education Teaching Practices” funded by a Wabash Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion Grant. In addition, she is working on “Making it Plain: Doing Theology in Black Community” funded by a Louisville Institute Grant, and a forthcoming collaborative book titled Black Church Studies: An Introduction.
Fernando Garcia is serving as the Academic Director of WORLD LEARNING School for International Training, Chile in Economic Development and Globalization and works occasionally as a consultant for the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy. He also recently finished his first novel set in 19th century Mexico and is currently working on “Bolivia-Chile: Bilateral Relations in the 21st century.”
Luin Goldring continues to work on the SSHRC funded project “Initiatives in the New Economy” (INE) with co-investigator Patricia Landolt, and has contributed a chapter on Latin American Transnationalism in Canada to a forthcoming collaborative work from UBC Press.
Judith Adler Hellman is on sabbatical for the 2005-2006 academic year. Her current work focuses on Mexican migration to the United States. Sally Humphries was recently appointed Director and Graduate Coordinator of the Collaborative International Development Studies Program. She continues her involvement in organizational activities associated with building a farmer research federation in Honduras.
Michael Kaufman continues to work as an educator, trainer and policy advisor for the United Nations, NGOs and governments focusing on gender equality and ending violence against women. He recently began a 3 year project funded by CIDA that works on building a Canada-Brazil cooperation project bringing together the White Ribbon Campaign with a consortium of NGOs throughout Brazil. He is also working with the Brazilian White Ribbon Campaign to develop a regional network of White Ribbon Campaigns in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is also currently writing a new novel.
Kathryn Kopinak was appointed Senior Fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she was in residence from January to June 2005. She is currently conducting research on the complementary relationship between international migration and Mexican maquiladora employment.
Lisa Kowalchuk joined the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at the University of Guelph as an Associate Professor in July 2004 and continues her work on social movements and collective action in Central America.
Peter Landstreet is writing an introductory sociology textbook designed to open the discipline up to the full range of human societies, through time and space, using comparative, evolutionary and historical approaches to the field. He was also the opening and closing speaker in the 2004 Later Life Learning lecture series on Latin America, at Innis College, University of Toronto.
Louis Lefeber presented a paper, “On the Meaning of Efficiency” jointly with Thomas Vietorisz at the First Annual Symposium on Development and Globalization, organized by Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University in November 2004.
Paul Lovejoy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History at York University. He holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History and is also a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. He has written, edited and co-edited a number of books and essays in 2004-2005 and received the Faculty of Arts Research Award in 2004. He has a number of publications forthcoming in 2006.
Laura Macdonald continues in her role as Director of the Centre of North American Politics and Society at Carleton University. She currently has in press a collaborative work titled Women, Democracy, and Globalization in North America: A Comparative Study, and Contentious Politics in North America, co-edited with Jeffrey Ayres, is under review by a university press.
Julia Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calgary. She is working on a number of projects involving the Calakmul Model Forest in Mexico related to work, gender and identity, tourism and development, and Mexican rural development. She also wrote the text for the photographic exhibition Ceremonía, celebración, y cambio at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City in 2004.
Jorge Nef continues as the Director of the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean and Professor of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida.
Pilar Riaño-Alcalá is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work & Family Studies at UBC. She recently received a National Mention of Honour in Social Sciences and Humanities from the Alejandro Escobar Foundation (Colombia), and received the Early Career Scholar Award from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC. She is currently conducting a comparative study on Fear, Historical Memory and Public Representation in Colombia, Ecuador and Canada, in addition to work on the forced migration, the cultural dimensions of violence and international and local social and community development.
Jim Rochlin is currently working on “Social Forces and the Revolution in Military Affairs: the Cases of Colombia and Mexico” (SUNY, forthcoming, 2006).
Richard Roman organized a conference on “NAFTA and the Future of North America: Trilateral Perspectives on Governance, Economic Development, and Labour” held in Toronto in February 2005, where he presented a paper co-authored with Edur Velasco Arregui, (UAM, Mexico) entitled “Solidarity or Competition: Mexican Workers, NAFTA, and the North American Labour Movement.” He is also currently completing two books with Edur Velasco Arregui on the Mexican Working Class and Continental Integration.
Judith Rudakoff was promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Theatre at York University. She is currently working on “Common Plants: Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality,” an international two-year transcultural, multimedia Fine Arts/Creation project funded by SSHRC.
Sandra Schecter is currently working on an action research project titled “Parent Involvement AS Educator: The primary and middle school classroom as a site of inter-generational language learning,” as well as a research proposal on “Inclusive Pedagogy as Policy.” She is also a consultant for the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on public policy and infrastructure as related to diversity and inclusion.
Yasmine Shamsie continues in her role as Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University and is currently working on “Moving Beyond Mediation: The OAS Transforming Conflict in Guatemala,” which has been accepted for future publication in Global Governance.
Alan Simmons continues his research with Dwaine Plaza and Victor Piché on migrant remittances from Jamaicans and Guyanese in Toronto and Haitians in Montreal to their respective home countries, for which he received a CIDA grant. He is also conducting research jointly with Jean Turner on resilience and resistance among Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in Toronto.
Patrick Solomon is working collaboratively on the SSHRC-funded project “The validity of the Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test (OTQT): Stakeholders’ perspectives”. He is also currently involved with the York International, York University – University of the West Indies academic exchange program as Academic Liason, and is studying the educational and cultural experiences of the exchange students in their host universities. In addition, he has co-edited a book entitled Innovations in urban teacher education and teaching to be published in the near future.
David Szablowski was appointed Associate Professor in York University’s Law & Society Department in 2005. Ricardo Trumper continues his research into a wide variety of topics including neoliberalism, transportation, health, sports, wine and tourism and rascism, with regional focus on Chile, Canada, and the Okanagan. He is currently co-authoring a number of articles, including “Poder, Neolibearlismo y el Metro de Santiago” and “Global Standards and Local Realities: The cleaning industry and cleaners in 21st century neoliberal Chile” with Patricia Tomic, and “Global Taste, Local Scripts: The Wines of the Okanagan and the Central Valley of Chile” with Patricia Tomic and Luis Aguiar.
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DWAINE PLAZA
After completing a BA in Sociology, Dwaine began the Masters program in Environmental Studies (MES) at York in 1987. He describes his experience in the interdisciplinary program as a positive one, and believes that it was during this time that his career in Caribbean Studies began to take shape. As an MES student, he enjoyed a number of opportunities to undertake field research in the Caribbean.
In 1990, Dwaine used his knowledge of the region to develop a more defined academic focus, and decided to enter the PhD programme in Sociology at York. His dissertation examined Caribbean migration in Canada, and focused specifically on the mobility strategies of university-educated black Caribbean-born men in Toronto. Dwaine describes the first few years of his Ph.D. as difficult but very rewarding, and is glad to have had the opportunity to work under the supervision of Alan Simmons, Clifford Jansen, and Carl James, who provided him with the support he needed to complete his research.
Throughout his PhD work, Dwaine remained an active and committed academic. Even before completing his dissertation, he accepted a post-doctoral fellowship with Oxford Brooks University in the UK, where he explored the life histories of immigrants by interviewing three generations of Caribbean migrants in Britain. After successfully defending his PhD and completing his post-doctoral fellowship, Dwaine moved to the United States and took up a full-time faculty position in the Sociology Department at Oregon State University, where he specializes in race and ethnic relations, research methods, and cross-cultural communication.
Dwaine has maintained close ties with both CERLAC and faculty members at York, spending his sabbatical year in 2004-2005 as a CERLAC Visiting Fellow. During this time, he worked with former thesis supervisor and CERLAC Fellow Alan Simmons on a CIDA-funded project examining the migration and transnational practices of Jamaicans and Haitians in Canada, as well as a smaller project that involved working with the Credit Union of Canada to research the remittance practices of Jamaicans. Together they have been invited to present their findings at a number of conferences, including a CALACS, FOCAL, and CIDA-funded conference this past summer. Alan speaks highly of Dwaine’s work: "Dwaine is a wonderful research colleague. He is deeply committed to the well-being of Caribbean peoples, having done research projects on, with and for Caribbean migrant communities in Canada and the United Kingdom and studies within the region itself. His knowledge is extensive and deep. He is one of the most energetic and generous collaborators I have ever worked with."
Dwaine has published on topics related to Caribbean migration, mobility, the second generation, and Caribbean migration specific to Canada and Britain, and clearly remains an engaged and interdisciplinary scholar. He has recently completed a manuscript for an edited volume on return migration to the Caribbean which he wrote with former York anthropologist Frances Henry. Although Dwaine plans to continue research on Caribbean migration and second generation studies, he also hopes to focus on Caribbean culture, music, and internet use in the region as part of his future studies. CERLAC is proud to support his work.
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EDUARDO CANEL
Indeed, Eduardo’s own research has always engaged with such movements. He relates his academic interests to where he first began his own political education: in social movements and civil society. Born in Uruguay, Eduardo was politically active as a high school student when he participated in student groups that organized against state repression in the early 1970s. Upon his arrival in Canada in 1974 as a political refugee from Uruguay and Chile, he became involved in several solidarity organizations, working to end repression and human rights violations in a number of Central and South American countries.
Telling of his commitment to social change, social movements in Latin America were the subject of Eduardo’s well-known and internationally recognized earlier work. His current work focuses specifically on the operation of neighbourhood councils in Montevideo, Uruguay, and their efforts to democratize city politics and create a new, more community-based model of governance. He spent his sabbatical in Uruguay from 2003-2004 where he studied three different working class communities in Montevideo in an effort to understand how each community has been affected by the municipal decentralization process introduced by the municipal left-wing government. He is interested in the true impact of decentralizaton for the residents of Montevideo in light of their involvement with these neighbourhood councils, and his work will consider the extent to which decentralization has created more opportunities for local development. Eduardo hopes to gain insight into why certain neighborhood groups in Montevideo may be gaining greater resources and participating more fully in community development than others. He is currently completing a manucript for a book based on his research, tentatively titled Building Local Democracy in Latin America: Municipal Decentralization and Working Class Communities in Montevideo.
In addition to his
outstanding record of scholarly publication, Eduardo’s colleagues and
students also recognize that he is an exceptional
teacher. He is appointed
to the Division of
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