Will we still have offices in the post-pandemic university?

In this essay, published as part of the LSE RB ‘Materiality of Research’ series examining the material cultures of academic research, reading and writing, Mark Carrigan explores the university office as a site for understanding some of the (unequal) changes to many academic lives during the COVID-19 pandemic and as a hint of what working life might look like when the lockdown is lifted. Who has the space to think? Who is able to retreat from the world? Who can do sustained work without interruption? How can we defend the office in the post-pandemic university, as a place to write and think, while rejecting the inequalities which surround it?