Professional Identities on Display

The academic office can be regarded as both a public and a private place, and as a place where professional identity is formed, reproduced, presented, and displayed. The academic office is therefore well suited to study the relationship between office use, office materiality and spatiality, disciplinary identity, and a professional's presentation of self. In this article, we use the artefacts on display in photographs of offices to understand how objects help humans form and experience identity, and how the entanglement of humans and objects in academic offices testifies to the private and public image of the professor's role in society over time. Four professor offices from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim (NTNU), spanning the period 1927 to 2022 and the disciplines of chemistry, architecture, and sociolinguistics, were selected for the study, using what Frank Cochoy has termed “an archaeology of present times.” We find that all four of the offices in question communicate professional and disciplinary identity through their spatiality and material objects. Some examples are instruments, beakers and test tubes for chemistry research, molecular models, document folders, papers, books, posters, artwork, building models, plans and maps, and the use of furniture. Their functions in the office are layered with complex and entangled relations, both physical and symbolic, to each other, to the academic occupying the office, and (through their connotations) to society at large. Together, they also illustrate differences in disciplinary spatial traditions and how technological development has influenced office materiality. Our study sheds light on the changing role of the professor during the last 100 years. Specifically, we argue that the photos of academic offices demonstrate an increasing entanglement between the private and the professional over time.