Desirée Valadares
- Research Interests/Specializations
- Critical heritage studies: sub-surface cultural property, war commemoration
- Legal geography: land tenure, jurisdiction, territoriality and empire
- Settler colonial studies: Asian North American/Indigenous relationality, sovereignty
- Carceral studies: camps, carceral infrastructure, military geographies
- Transitional justice: redress social movements, judicial accountability in settler states
- Transpacific / Oceanic studies: Pacific Island, Arctic and Pacific Canadian studies
- Degrees
- M.Arch (Post-Professional), Urban Design and Housing, McGill University
- MLA (Professional) Landscape Architecture, University of Guelph
- MLA-Exchange, Coursework in M.Sc. Architectural Conservation, University of Edinburgh
- B.Arts Sc. (Combined Hons.) Arts and Science and Art History, McMaster University
- Biography
I am a landscape architect and writer. My dissertation project engages with interdisciplinary debates in critical heritage and infrastructure studies, environmental and oceanic histories, carceral geographies and migration and mobility studies in the Indigenous Pacific.
I study the politics of preserving sub-surface infrastructure at three Second World War confinement landscapes (or internment camps) in Hawai'i and Alaska and British Columbia. I pay attention to changing patterns of land tenure at these sites and argue for a heritage politics attuned to competing and overlapping Asian settler war memories of unjust incarceration and Indigenous (Pacific Islander, Alaska Native and Coast Salish) land claims.
I use a mixed-methods approach to conduct hands-on site fieldwork through architectural documentation, non-invasive field archaeology and gardening. I couple this with archival research in pictorial collections (cartographic, engineering records and photography). I also consider unarchived visual, performative, oral and lived experience of place from primarily, Asian migrant and Indigenous standpoints. I combine this ethnographic and visual analysis with legal analysis of judicial and quasi-judicial records (treaties, land title, redress and reparation bills, commissions of inquiry, land restitution acts and historic preservation policy) across these disparate geographies in the transpacific U.S. and Canada.