Sara Jacobs is a critical landscape designer, historian and educator. Through writing and drawing, Jacobs thinks about how practices of care and socioecological relations become legible through landscape to work toward just land futures. Jacobs’s work considers how attending to the conditions that produce the need for care within historical spatial processes of racialization and settler-colonialism allows for challenging dominant environmental knowledge within contested landscapes. Jacobs is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (SALA) at the University of British Columbia.

Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Valadares’ research and teaching focuses on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of the Second World War in western Canada and the non-contiguous US. In her current book project, Valadares theorizes 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. She draws insights from archival research, and place-based research methods including architectural drawing and photography in addition to participant-engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, and salvage at former confinement sites. Broadly, Valadares’ research contributes to ongoing debates on infrastructural repair, war reparations, Asian North American-Indigenous relations, settler colonialism and land dispossession at former Second World War confinement sites in former US territories and in western Canada.

Valadares trained as an architectural historian (Berkeley), urban designer (McGill) and landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh) and worked in private practice, government, and non-profits in landscape architecture, master planning, heritage conservation (Canada) and historic preservation (U.S.). Currently, Valadares holds professional affiliations with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and is a registered landscape architect with the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects (BCSLA).

Professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, Jane Wolff works on the premise that different people see and experience the same landscape in various ways, and her research goal is to unite these diverse perceptions into a universally comprehensible language. By generating a unique vocabulary for each landscape, she discovers and tells meaningful stories about a site’s past and present circumstances and to address its future. Wolff is the 2022 recipient of the Margolese Design for Living Prize.