My research offers a psychoanalytic conception of underemployment in relation to the graduate labour market in the UK. It specifically adopts a critical Lacanian perspective to consider the affective nature of underemployment discourse within this context. For example, an important question that my research asks is: why might individuals desire to define themselves as over-educated / underemployed? I am particularly interested in the unconscious, paradoxical desires which might be at play here, and the role of fantasies in facilitating such desires.