My research and teaching focus on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of the Second World War in western Canada and former U.S. territories.

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 methods including architectural drawing and photography in addition to participant-engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, and salvage at former wartime confinement sites. Broadly, my research contributes to ongoing debates on heritage preservation, war memory, land dispossession, Asian North American-Indigenous relations, and settler colonialism at former Second World War confinement sites in former US territories and in western Canada.

A second project dwells on dust to study the postwar and present-day conditions of the Alaska Highway, a former military road in northern British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska. I focus on the material and atmospheric politics of unsettled dust and consider its impacts on debates over the maintenance of bi-national roadways.

I trained as an architectural historian (Berkeley), urban designer (McGill), and landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh). Currently, I hold professional affiliations with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and am a landscape architect (non-stamp) with the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects (BCSLA).

2024

Valadares, D. Lê Espiritu 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.

I am eager to support MA and PhD research on material, infrastructural, oceanic, architectural, and landscape histories that rely on archival research, place-based methods and community engagement. As a Faculty Affiliate in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies, I welcome inquiries from students pursuing projects on diaspora, Indigenous-Asian settler relations, and cultural geographies of placemaking and remembrance. I am especially keen to support architects, designers, artists, among other creative professionals who aspire to produce experimental research outputs (research-creation or artistic-creation), alongside a scholarly thesis or dissertation.

I welcome inquiries from prospective applicants. Please email me to discuss.

Current Graduate Supervision:

Gillian Der (MA Geography, co-supervised)
Tam-anh Nguyen (MA Geography)
Judee Burr (PhD Geography, committee member)
Estraven Lupino Smith (PhD Geography, committee member)