Alum Desirée Valadares honored with award for her study of the politics of heritage landscapes
Congratulations to CED alum Desirée Valadares (PhD Architecture 2022) on winning the Phyllis Lambert Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on the subject of the built environment in Canada. The award is presented biennially by the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. Valadares is now assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.
Valadares’s dissertation, Transpacific Heritage Politics: Preserving Former Confinement Landscapes in Hawaiʻi, British Columbia, and Alaska, focuses on the heritage politics of confinement or internment landscapes. She looks at the commemoration of World War II at the Honouliuli Prisoner of War and Internment Camp in Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi; the Tashme Internment Camp in Sunshine Valley and a network of road labor camps in Interior British Columbia, Canada; and Funter Bay near Juneau, Southeast Alaska.
Valadares argues that heritage designation processes fundamentally alter land tenure and reshape the contemporary material and environmental conditions of these sites located on occupied land (in Hawaiʻi), unceded land (in British Columbia), and contested land (in Alaska).
Ultimately, the dissertation considers how processes of heritage preservation can be better oriented towards a politics of restitution of land in settler colonial contexts, given intersectional histories of dispossession and forced removal.