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.