This paper focuses on the mundane material objects, signs and stuff with which we share our days in the space of the university. It does so in order to ask the following questions: • How do we engage with ‘personal’ objects in educational workplaces? • How do handwritten or typed signs work to produce intra-active spatial engagements and with what effects? • Why do we as educationalists collect and fill our offices with stuff? The paper draws on data from a current project called ‘Borrowed Spaces: A Multisensory Exploration of Workplace Territories’ to explore how attending to the apparently inconsequential life of objects, signs and stuff in university spaces can disclose some important ontological, relational and intra-active insights about gender, identity, power and space. We use the empirical data to develop a hybrid, interdisciplinary theorization which draws on insights from material culture, space and educational practice. In bringing together Miller’s (2010: 4) view that ‘the best way to understand, convey and appreciate our humanity is through attention to our fundamental materiality’ with Massey’s (2005: 9) idea of space as ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’, this paper offers a significant and innovative account of objects, space and workplace practices in the university.