My research and teaching focus on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of the Second World War in western Canada and the non-contiguous US.

In my current book project, I theorize repair through Pacific redress movements which coalesce around the preservation and stewardship of Second World War confinement landscapes in Hawai’i, Alaska and British Columbia. I draw insights from archival research, and place-based research methods including architectural drawing and photography in addition to participant-engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, and salvage at former confinement sites. Broadly, my research contributes to ongoing debates on infrastructural repair, war reparations, Asian North American-Indigenous relations, settler colonialism and land dispossession at former Second World War confinement sites in former US territories and in western Canada.

A second project dwells on dust as a disruptive tool and imaginative metaphor to study the Alaska Highway, a former military road in northern British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska. I focus on dust’s fugitivity and indeterminacy along this route and contend that atmospheric thinking is a key terrain of infrastructural politics in debates over the maintenance of bi-national roadways.

I trained as an architectural historian (Berkeley), urban designer (McGill) and landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh) and worked in private practice, government, and non-profits in landscape architecture, master planning, heritage conservation (Canada) and historic preservation (U.S.).

Currently, I hold professional affiliations with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and am a registered landscape architect with the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects (BCSLA).

2024

Valadares, D. Gandhi, E. Jeychandran, N. and A. Murphy. 2024. Theorizing Transits: Im/mobility, Im/materiality, Im/permanence. In Verge Global Asias: Tactics and Theories for a Global Asias Praxis, edited by  T. Chen and C. Eubanks. University of Hawaii Press.

2023

Valadares, D. 2023. Thinking Like a Gulch: Pacific War Heritage, Settler Lands and Toxic Uncertainties in O‘ahu. Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. Toxics Project. doi: https://doi.org/10.53965/BJTM8353

Valadares, D. 2023. Uneven Mobilities: Infrastructural Imaginaries on The Hope-Princeton Highway. The Radical History Review (147): 158-185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10637232

Valadares, D. 2023.  Economies and Circuits of Repair: On Reparative Justice Within/Beyond the State: An Interview with Jovan Scott Lewis. Journal of Architectural Education. Special Issue: Reparations! 77 (1). doi: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10464883.2023.2165808

2022

Valadares, D. 2022. Conjuring the Commons: National Monuments as Technical Lands. In Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, edited by C. Waldheim and J. Nesbit. JOVIS Verlag.

2021

Valadares, D. 2021. Unsettling “Historic Integrity” at Honouliuli National Heritage Site, O’ahu, Hawai’i. Change Over Time 10(2): 178-182. doi: doi:10.1353/cot.2021.0008.

Prior to my appointment at UBC in July 2022, I published creative work, photography, and writing in The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies, Places Journal, and The Avery Review. I also contributed chapters to edited volumes, co-authored cultural landscape assessments and made architectural drawings according to HABS/HALS Historic American Buildings and Landscapes standards.

Please email me if you are interested in working with me on a MA project related to environmental, infrastructural, oceanic, or architectural histories. I look forward to mentoring students with an interest in archival research, historical methods, and public and community-engaged commitments. I am especially keen to support architects, designers, artists, among others who aspire to produce creative, and experimental research outputs.