The evening starts with an online lecture by Aimi Hamraie, followed by a conversation together with Leni Van Goidsenhoven. Afterwards there will be interventions by Staci Bu Shea and Carly Everaert, ending with an aftertalk.
Accessibility is often understood as a way to correct built environments not designed with disability in mind. In this talk, Dr. Aimi Hamraie will instead explore the broader meanings and practices of access in the twentieth and twenty-first century architecture, design, and disability arts. The talk will focus on four themes: assimilation and anti-assimilation, productivity and anti-productivity, normalization and critique, and the new vocabularies of critical access.
Considering how we can be transformed through giving and receiving care, Staci Bu Shea will reflect on vulnerability and its implications for connection and dignity across interpersonal and institutional domains.
Carly Everaert’s presentation will trace how creating spaces for other(ed) bodies — and radically rethinking what a learning space can be — opened the way for their long-term collaboration with Mira Thompson: “Interdependence: On Disability Justice and the (Performing) Arts”. Together, they developed a practice in which co-creation is lived interdependence, crip time is a generative force, and artistic freedom can flourish. This led Carly to altarscenography: theorising how care, attention and solidarity create sacred spaces, where aesthetics and ethics meet as the spiritual foundation for solidarity itself.
Aimi Hamraie is the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability, and Associate Professor of Social Science at York University. Hamraie’s research on disability and design has helped form the fields of critical access studies and crip technoscience. They are the director of the Critical Design Lab. Hamraie is author of ‘Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability’ (2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability and design. They are a 2022 United States Artists Fellow and Member of the U.S. Access Board.
Staci Bu Shea is a curator, writer, educator and careworker based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Broadly, Bu Shea convenes with others over aesthetic, critical, and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships, daily life, community organizing, and institutional practices. Bu Shea is the author of Dying Livingly (Solution series, Sternberg Press, 2025). Bu Shea was curator at Casco Art Institute of Working for the Commons (Utrecht, 2017–2022) and co-curator of Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, 2017). Bu Shea holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016).
Carly Everaert is an award-winning costume designer and dramaturgical scenographer. As a lecturer and researcher at the Academy of Theater and Dance in Amsterdam, Carly explores costume, bodies, and sustainability from an intersectional perspective. Their practice is becoming increasingly rooted in the principles of Disability Justice, making diverse abilities, knowledge, and ways of moving more visible. Carly collaborates with artists, curators, educators, and scholars who prioritize embodied knowledge. Carly’s methodology combines critical reflection with material experiments—where making is viewed as a form of thinking. Carly is chair of the jury for the Dutch Theater Festival’s Design Award. Their essay ‘Altarscenography, disability justice and staging coincidence, a secular-spiritual practice of solidarity, on solidarity, coincidence, and shared vulnerability as scenographic practice’ will be published in August 2026.
Leni Van Goidsenhoven is Assistant Professor of Critical Disability Studies at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Her research focuses on disability, illness, neurodiversity, and non-normative bodyminds in the arts and literature. She is the author of Autisme in veelvoud (Garant, 2020) and OnGehoord (EPO, 2021). Her recent work includes the special issue Cripping Choreography and the forthcoming volume Disability Heritage: Participatory and Transformative Engagement (co-edited with Manon Parry, Routledge). Alongside her academic work, she regularly curates projects for theatres and museums.
This programme is a collaboration between Curatorial Lectures, KASKlectures and Studium Generale Gent. The event will be in English and will take place in the Zwarte Zaal of KASK. The Zwarte Zaal is located on the ground floor and is accessible to wheelchair users, there’s also an accessible toilet in the hallway of KASKcafé. In case you use a wheelchair, go via the entrance of KASKcinema instead of the Louis Pasteurlaan entrance. There are works in the street of KASKcinema, but it’s possible to pass by the entrance at Godshuizenlaan 4. A translation into Flemish sign language will be provided. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: helena.verheye@hogent.be
