Login | Register

Haunted Utopias: interpersonal culture, conflict, and cohesion in the activist-workplace

Title:

Haunted Utopias: interpersonal culture, conflict, and cohesion in the activist-workplace

Grazette, Richenda (2025) Haunted Utopias: interpersonal culture, conflict, and cohesion in the activist-workplace. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

[thumbnail of Grazette_MA_S2026.pdf]
Preview
Text (application/pdf)
Grazette_MA_S2026.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Spectrum Terms of Access.
5MB

Abstract

This research examines how workers in the “activist-workplace” (small political and mission-driven nonprofits) envision, understand, and interact with their organization’s efforts to create “internal utopias” through their governance and human resources practices. Using a hauntological methodology, research participants were guided through a ghost-story writing workshop in which they explored both what ancestral lessons informed their vision of the ideal, and how those spectral presences cause and interact with conflict in the present. The stories from the participants drew out themes of identity, diaspora, and nostalgia, pointing to the ways that orientations and cross-generational inheritances continue to impact everyday life. Those haunting presences also impacted the ways that participants conceptualized the future, with many expressing doubts about the possibility of achieving organizational utopia, even as they continue working and hoping for its realisation. Ultimately, this project reinforced much of existing thinking of utopia as a process rather than an endstate: that it acts as its own orienting device from which workers can continue building critique of the dominant order whilst imagining better and brighter futures.

Divisions:Concordia University > School of Graduate Studies > Individualized Program
Item Type:Thesis (Masters)
Authors:Grazette, Richenda
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:M.A.
Program:Individualized Program
Date:2 September 2025
Thesis Supervisor(s):Sheftel, Anna and Reilly, Rosemary and Dyer, Linda
Keywords:hauntology utopia activism nonprofits organizational trauma
ID Code:996391
Deposited By: RICHENDA LOUISE GRAZETTE
Deposited On:29 Jun 2026 14:11
Last Modified:29 Jun 2026 14:11
All items in Spectrum are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved. The use of items is governed by Spectrum's terms of access.

Repository Staff Only: item control page

Downloads per month over past year

Research related to the current document (at the CORE website)
- Research related to the current document (at the CORE website)
Back to top Back to top