Intro

Studium Generale 2024-25 explores the accessibility of art and cultural practices through a ‘Crip’ perspective. This approach emphasizes interdependency, mutual solidarity, and shared

responsibility among our diverse bodies and minds. Once a term used negatively to describe people with disabilities, ‘Crip’ has been reclaimed by artists, activists, and scholars as a positive and empowering term, akin to ‘queer.’ It challenges harmful norms and prejudices and examines how disability intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, and the environment, encouraging us to consider these connections on both personal and political levels.

Despite this, numerous barriers persist in our daily lives and learning environments. Many spaces remain inaccessible due to poor design and a lack of adequate accommodations and tools. Educational materials often marginalize or overlook diverse voices and bodyminds. By working with Crip artists, activists, and thinkers, we aim to reimagine the academy, our community, and our artistic practices through this Crip lens. How can we make accessibility a core aspect of our learning, thinking, and creating, rather than an afterthought or add-on?

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is a transdisciplinary theory programme that addresses students and faculty across all departments and disciplines at the academy, as well as the general public. It wants to understand how art and design are entangled with other domains (from the personal to the political, from the vernacular to the academic), how ‘now’ is linked with past and future, and ‘here’ with ‘elsewhere’.