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.

Wed, Jan 21 — Wed, Mar 11, 2026Reading GroupsloVe making ᥫ᭡
To programme

Daddy Issues: Romance, Fantasy, Other Patriarchal Fallout, and Movements Towards the Planetary

If the TV show Lost teaches us anything, it’s that being a Dad is hard, but having a Dad is
harder. The co-producing feedback between the Father and patriarchal society is a minefield
of pressure to provide, tough love, emotional absence, discipline, depression, repression,
longing, vicarious living, role modelling, caretaking, and earning as value.

Upon the realisation that the dialogue and relationships of Lost were a site where the mostly
male writers’ room could work through and re-imagine the emotional disappointments in their
relationships with their dads, I started thinking about how these fatherly absences or actions
appear, are processed, or patched over in other reflections of these familial relationships.
We will start with the often-celebrated family values of the Addams family and move through
a reverse-engineered Orc Romantasy, a 19th-century Scottish shapeshifting ballad, poems
and essays about dads and their relationships to love and work, before our last stop towards
Planetary love.

Session 1
Romance scenes between Morticia and Gomez Addams. Extracts from the Addams
Family and Addams Family Values screenplays
Larry Wilson and Caroline Thompson
Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism
Re-reading Bewitched and The Addams Family to reconcile the sexual deviancy of the
Witch and the nuclear family.
The Parody Within: The Employment of the Parodic Mode in The Addams Family
(1991)
Anne I. Bertram
https://www.aspeers.com/sites/default/files/pdf/bertram.pdf

Session 2
Tusk Love
Thea Guanzon
The Ballad of Tam Lin
1882-1898 by Francis James Child
cites: Johnson’s Museum, 1792, communicated by Burns
https://tam-lin.org/versions/39A.html#:~:text=I%20am%20your%20bairn’s%20father,ill%20de
ath%20may%20she%20die%2C
Red Shift
Alan Garner

Session 3
Being a Boy
bell hooks
A Father’s Work Is Never Done
Nathan Hoks
Work: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
bell hooks

Session 4
Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
Ross Gay
Father
Edgar Albert Guest
Roman Poem Number Six
June Jordan
Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood
June Jordan

Session 5
Father figures in the Broken Earth Trilogy
Shaffer and Nassun; Jija and Nassun
N.K. Jemisin
But which is the Way the World Ends?: The Dual Nature of Anger and Power of
Brotherly Love in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy
Aihua Chen &Yujie Lei

Session 6
Meta-Rhetoric
June Jordan
Shortsong From My Heart
June Jordan
Love’s Multiplicity: Jeong and Spivak’s Notes toward Planetary Love
W. ANNE JOH

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