Liz Morrish, on the politics and symbolism of professorial Zoom backgrounds:
Unsurprisingly, most universities will recommend that academics should be seated in front of a bookshelf. I find this deeply ironic. I once worked for a vice chancellor who was keen to introduce shared offices and hot desking (for us, not him, and we resisted). Early on, we raised the issue of where to house bookshelves. The response came back that academics didn’t need books – these were just ‘academic bling’. It is interesting that such disposable encumberances are now the preferred background when it is a question of appropriate branding. At this point background becomes very much the foreground.