Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

You and Your Brain — What Neuroscience Can (Not) Do
Stephan Schleim

No doubt, neurosciences are “in”. Stephan Schleim will present examples for how the neurosciences are influencing society — and for how they aren’t. Besides having the potential for genuinely new insights and treatments of neurological disorders, brain research also carries risks for people’s individuality and subjectivity. Reasons for the latter are primarily standardization and reductionism within the (natural) sciences. The talk will challenge you to think about the question who knows you better: you or the neuroscientist?

Stephan Schleim is Associate Professor for History and Theory of Psychology at the University of Groningen. He did his PhD in cognitive science and was probably the first to ever investigate lawyers in a brain scanner. His current research is about the science communication and philosophy of the neurosciences. He is also a science writer and blogger with books about “brain reading” (2008) or the “neuro society”(2011).