Tara Bissett, PhD (She/Her)

Tara Bissett is a scholar of the built environment and Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. She holds a PhD (Architectural History) from the University of Toronto where she was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral fellow. Tara’s research explores architecture as an expanded field, focusing on the history of women who have shaped spatial counter practices inside and outside of the home. On these subjects she has authored “Conflicts of Care: Contesting Visions of Urban Reform” in Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada (2023) and “Building, Dwelling, Sustaining. Learning from Women’s Cooperatives” in CLARA Architecture/Recherche Journal (forthcoming 2024). She is co-writing a book called An Architectural Genealogy of Care: A Reader, which compiles an archive of voices who have written on the architecture of care work since 1750. Tara is interested in the ways that “home” inflects non-homelike spaces, especially practices that lead us to question where home ends and the institution begins: shelters, day cares, age homes, reformatories. Her most recent research traces the history of women’s housing collectives between 1500 to 1950 that have emerged due to exclusionary laws and practices. The work explores communality as a condition shaped by unruly practices and traces the fraught terrain that merges the home, shelter, and penitentiary.

Tara is interested in collaborative and community-led approaches to teaching, design, and scholarship. She has chaired panels and presented on experimental pedagogies as well as disability-first methodologies, at RAIC and SAH, among others. Tara is passionate about disability justice and works to advance pedagogical methods for disability inclusion.

Tara has co-taught a studio on disability inclusion called Designing for Every Body and another that foregrounded community engagement with children, The Child in the City. Tara also teaches Cultural History courses. She is on the Racial Equity and Environmental Justice Taskforce/Committee at the University of Waterloo.

• ARCH 246 - Cultural Encounters 600-1600
  • Taught in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
• ARCH 285 - Architectural Research
  • Taught in 2019
• ARCH 342 - Modernisms: Local and Global
  • Taught in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
• ARCH 393 - Option Design Studio
  • Taught in 2022, 2023
• ARCH 484 - Architectural Research
  • Taught in 2019
• ARCH 642 - Modernism to the 21st Century
  • Taught in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
• ARCH 690 - Design Studio
  • Taught in 2023

* Only courses taught in the past 5 years are displayed.