The Life of a Campus Bench: An Object Biography

This paper applies the Object Biography methodological framework to a contemporary, everyday object: a collection of ordinary campus benches located outside the Erasmus Building at Radboud University. Drawing on Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the cultural biography of things, Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall’s work on material traces, and Daniel Miller's theories of material culture, the study explores how an ordinary object shifts in status between public utility, informal social space, and historical record. Through close material and contextual observation, the paper examines how repeated human interactions leave physical "material texts" (wear, scratches, smoothed surfaces) on wood and metal infrastructure. Furthermore, it utilizes James J. Gibson’s affordance theory and Bruno Latour's material politics to analyse moments of disruption, specifically during student protests where the benches are reclassified into political platforms. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on the strengths and limitations of applying object biographies to mundane contemporary objects embedded within institutional and digital networks.