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Ada Jaarsma, PhD
Professor
Office: EA3159
Phone: 403.440.8545
Email: ajaarsma@mtroyal.ca
Education
PhD - Purdue University
MA - Trent University
BA - University of Waterloo
Scholarly Interests
My research takes place at the intersections of feminist continental philosophy, feminist science studies, and critical disability studies. I’m working on a co-edited collection, “Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing,” with Lauren Guilmette (Elon University), which is under contract with Duke University. This book project is in conversation with the philoSOPHIA 2024 conference we co-hosted at the Mount Royal University Library. I also collaborate with Suze Berkhout (University of Toronto) on the philosophical significance of placebos and placebo effects. And I’m writing a series of essays on Kierkegaard (and existentialism more broadly) in conversation with crip and queer studies. Most of my publications can be found here. I’m associate editor for Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy and contributing curator for Syndicate.
Teaching
I teach courses in continental philosophy, existentialism, feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of sex and love, and philosophy and critical health studies. I bring arts-based, collaborative methods into course-designs, and I share most of my syllabi, lessons, and assignments as open-access resources here: https://mtroyal.academia.edu/AdaJaarsma
Selected Scholarly Activity
Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom, nominated for the 2021 Teaching Literature Book Award, co-edited with Kit Dobson (University of Alberta Press, 2020)
“Choose your own birth,” Aeon (March 2020)
“Encounters with Deleuze: An Interview with Constantin V. Boundas and Daniel W. Smith,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 23(3) spring 2020, 139-174.
“Critical Disability Studies and the Problem of Method,” Transdisciplinary Feminist Research Practices. Ed. Carol Taylor and Christina Hughes (Routledge, 2020), shortlisted for AERA Outstanding Book Award.
Kierkegaard after the Genome: Science, Existence and Belief in This World (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), with symposium on the book at Syndicate.
Selected Honours, Grants and Awards
- SSHRC Insight grant, Placebos Talk Back (2020–2023)
You can find all of my publications, as well as the lessons and syllabi that I create for my courses, here. One of my side projects is making philosopher-portraits: here’s an interview about the project. For the past five years, I’ve turned to sound studies and podcasting to create podcast-based courses: Sonic Existentialisms & Philosophy of Science Podcast Course & Feminist Philosophies of Life: A Podcast Course. You’ll find all of the assignments, lessons, and syllabi at these links: a podcast-based pedagogy is, by definition, an open-access pedagogy).