Rafico Ruiz and Desiree Valadares will present a lecture as part of the Spring 2021 HTX Lecture Series, which fall under the theme Spaces of Extraction.

Rafico Ruiz is director of research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. He pursues research on settler infrastructure building and design in the circumpolar world, with adjacent interests in post-global warming ice as a material form of political economic and cultural communication. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation and the Promise of Extraction and the co-editor with Melody Jue of Saturation: An Elemental Politics.

Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Valadares is trained in landscape architecture and architectural history. She writes about land, territory, and empire in Canada and the US’ non-contiguous states, territories, and possessions. Her research focuses on the heritage politics of commemorating sites of forced wartime relocation and incarceration, and its Indigenous entanglements in the Pacific.