My research and teaching focus on territoriality, occupation, and empire in Canada and the non-contiguous US with a focus on the aftermath of Asian migration (wartime forced relocation) and Indigenous intersections in the Pacific.

In my current project, I theorize repair through transpacific redress movements which coalesce around the preservation and stewardship of Second World War confinement landscapes in Hawai’i, Alaska and British Columbia. I work alongside community organizations, cultural heritage professionals, and policymakers and draw insights from archival research and place-based methods including architectural drawing, photography, and participant-action research. Broadly, my research contributes to ongoing debates on war reparations, Asian-Indigenous relations, land tenure in settler colonial contexts, and infrastructural and environmental histories of Second World War prison camps in former US territories and in western Canada.

I am trained as a landscape architect (Guelph; Edinburgh), urban designer (McGill), and architectural historian (UC Berkeley) with particular expertise in the arts, museum, and cultural heritage fields. I remain active in these professional communities in the US and Canada and contribute my expertise to policy issues. I am committed to working with racial/ethnic groups, migrant and refugees, and Indigenous peoples on issues of stewardship, access, repatriation, and collective ownership of culturally significant places and objects. Currently, I serve on two national committees: the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) Cultural and Historic Landscapes Committee, and the ICOMOS Canada’s (International Council on Monuments and Sites) Heritage Policy Standing Committee where I advocate for the protection of culturally significant landscapes at the local, provincial/territorial, and national levels.

2022

Valadares, D. “Unsettling Historic Integrity at Honouliuli National Historic Site.” (Provocation). Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation of the Built Environment. (ISSN: 2153-0548). 10.2: Integrity (2021): 178-182. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Valadares, D. “Conjuring the Commons: National Monuments as Technical Lands” in Technical Lands: A Critical Primer. JOVIS Verlag. Charles Waldheim and Jeffrey Nesbit eds. 2022.

Valadares, D. “Thinking Like a Gulch: Pacific War Heritage, Settler Lands and Toxic Uncertainties in O‘ahu.” Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. Toxics Project. 2022.

Prior to my appointment at UBC in July 2022, I published creative work and writing in The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies, Places Journal, and The Avery Review. I have curated small scale exhibitions, contributed chapters to edited volumes and co-authored several heritage reports, inventories and assessments with accompanying HABS/HALS architectural drawings with organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the US National Park Service- Pacific West and Alaska Regional Offices in combination with local interest groups.

Please email me if you are interested in working with me on a MA topic related to environmental or landscape history, architectural or infrastructural studies, heritage politics, oceanic geographies, public memory, diaspora and race relations in North America (particularly among Asian North American groups, Indigenous people, and other arrivant or newcomer populations). I look forward to mentoring students with an interest in archival research, historical methods, public and community-engaged commitments. Finally, I am keen to support artists, writers, designers among others who aspire to produce creative, and experimental research outputs and maintain artistic practices while enrolled in the Geography Department.