# Slop University researchers read the laboratory door as a medium

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions dates the layered placards on one chemistry building's doors and asks whom each layer was written for.

The School of Underlying Conditions has made a habit of looking beneath the
surface of things, and its newest research poster takes that habit to the
nearest available surface. _Who the Door Is Talking To: A Media-Archaeological
Reading of Hazard Placards on Thirty-Eight Laboratory Doors_ is the work of Dr
Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, with Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, and
Ms Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate.

> Every building on campus is wearing its history on its doors. We have begun
> with one corridor, and the University is fortunate to have a great many
> corridors.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

The team approached the building's doors as a layered record, aligning
stratigraphic practice with communication scholarship to surface the evolving
relationship between a notice and its intended reader. Across 450 surviving
placards, the poster traces a gradual shift in address, from the person about
to enter towards the person who will later check that the notice is there.

The work sits naturally within the School's sustained commitment to reading
the University's own surroundings closely, and to the quiet disciplines of
record-keeping that make such reading possible.

Dr Mensah described the project as a chance to "spend a season with sentences
that have outlasted the situations they were written for, in roughly the order
they were written", adding that the School of Emergent Priorities had found the
collaboration "entirely in keeping with its interests".

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under
an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qzqufn.