Abstract
Higher education institutions in the Anglophone world are organised according to a commodified logic, with power concentrated in senior management and the workforce divided into permanent and precarious employees. This paper draws from our own experience of organising with the Postgraduate Workers’ Alliance (PGWA; read pig-wa) from 2018 to 2023 in the Irish higher education context, and specifically within the University of Galway (formerly NUI Galway). Our discussion reflects on the localised development and articulation of a radical counter-imaginary in and through this self-organised collective of postgraduate workers, and the challenges of embedding these alternative imaginaries in existing institutional structures. PGWA initially mobilised around frustration at the devaluation of postgraduate labour and the unequal distribution of resources within the university. Through the production and sharing of data about working conditions in the form of workers’ inquiries, this fragmented resistance coalesced into a solidaristic counter-imaginary. PGWA’s logo, an angry pig, both reflects its distancing from the policing of affects structured around institutional ‘happy talk’, and functions as a vignette for narrating the (in)visibility of this counter-imaginary within the corporate university. The university’s fixation on the ‘residue’ left behind by stickers bearing the likeness of the PGWA pig indicate local refusal mechanisms that actively censure disruptive imaginaries, and highlights the ongoing work required to ensure that the existence of exploitative practices leave no visible traces on the surface of the managerial imaginary.