Jason Glynos
Biographic Data
| ID | 208584 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason Glynos |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason |
| FAMILY NAME | Glynos |
| SIGNATURE | GLYNOS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4801-4001 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 464 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Thanabots, fantasy, and the ethics of mourning
Thanabots—digital recreations of the dead powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—comprise media that allow the dead to remain present in the world of the living. In this article we unpack the psychic dimension of users’ diverse stances towards thanabots, asking how this dimension can contribute to our understanding of the patterns of users’ responses to loss. Drawing on Critical Fantasy Studies, we examine journalistic reports featuring actual u…
Ecopolitical catatonia: How political fantasies sustain inaction in global environmental politics
Democracy in Action: Experiencing Transformative Education
Our time is one of permacrisis, affecting the economy, the environment, and everything in between. In this context, UK higher education faces an existential crisis, where the university sector has been transformed into a marketplace, turning students into consumers and limiting the critical potential of education. In moving beyond these limits, this article explores Democracy in Action (DinA), a final-year undergraduate module offered in a UK uni…
International environmental sustainability discourse in the wake of Covid-19: Exploring the psychic dimension of political discourse through fantasy
In accounting for the lack of political will to meaningfully tackle environmental crises at a global level, a growing number of scholars argue that we must take seriously the role emotional and unconscious attachments play in policy discourse. In this paper, we argue that the psychic dimension of international environmental sustainability discourse (IESD) remains under-explored compared to the scholarly attention given to the structural and norma…
Navigating desires beyond growth: The Critical Role of Fantasy in Degrowth’s Environmental Politics and Prefigurative Ethics
As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement contests the hegemony of economic growth. Much scholarship has sought to unpack degrowth's proposals to reduce matter and energy throughput and to promote socio-ecological justice, democracy and wellbeing. Few studies, however, examine how the movement sustains itself. In this article, therefore, we explore the role fantasy plays in the movement's emergence and sustenance. We dr…
Community organising and radical democracy: From praxis to theory and back again
Community organising is a way of doing democratic politics distinct from electoral and radical protest politics yet has been largely overlooked in discourse studies and activist scholarship, particularly when compared to the attention paid to ‘flashier’ grassroots movements. We aim to contribute to rectifying this shortcoming by exploring the conceptual connections between community organising and the political discourse theory of radical democra…
Discourse theory and the turn to practice: Lessons from the populist moment
This introductory article to the special issue on Discourse Theory and the Turn to Practice, takes the questions and tensions identified through the intensive study of populism as starting point for reflections on Discourse Theory as a framework for the study of political practice more broadly. Its aims are partly organizational and partly agenda-setting. Organizationally, it draws together major discussions and developments in Discourse Theory o…
The challenges of coeliac disease at work: A contestation of the politics of inclusion
By focusing on the experiences of employees living with coeliac disease as evidenced in UK employment tribunal cases, this paper interrogates the way practices of exclusion are performed in legal and organisational contexts that purport to promote values of inclusion. In paying attention to how differences are constructed and negotiated, the paper unpacks the way organisational practices mobilise an array of workplace mechanisms to produce comple…
Anti-populist fantasies: Interrogating Veja 's discursive constructions, from Lula to Bolsonaro
In this paper we draw on the concept of fantasy and the principles of political discourse theory to develop an analytical framework for the study of Veja's anti-populist discourse. As one of Brazil's most influential publications in elite policy-making circles, Veja exerts considerable influence over the way populist politics is portrayed and understood. By tracking the signifiers 'populism' and 'populist' in the pages of this weekly magazine, ou…
Paradoxes in the Management of Timebanks in the UK’s Voluntary Sector: Discursive Bricolage and its Limits
This paper contributes to our understanding of volunteer management by charting some important challenges associated with the governance of one of the UK’s largest timebanking networks. While timebanking is often treated as a form of volunteering, many timebank advocates are keen to distinguish it sharply from traditional volunteering. We suggest that this tension generates a fundamental ‘performance paradox’ in the management of timebanks in the…
Microfoundationalist Reconciliation: The Fundamental Fantasy of Neoclassical Economics—Some Reflections on Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics
Using neoclassical thought as his entry point, Yahya
Critical fantasy studies
Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the categor…
Beyond populism studies
Populism’ has become ever more ubiquitous in political analysis, to the extent that ‘populism studies’ appears on course to establishing itself as a field of research in its own right. This article warns about the dangers of such a development. Taking a discourse theoretical approach as our starting point – but also critically engaging with this tradition’s contribution to the hype about populism – we suggest that ‘populism studies’ (and the preo…
Moving discourse theory forward: A five-track proposal for future research
This article assesses the current state of play of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory associated with Laclau and Mouffe and the ‘Essex school’, and identifies ways forward at the level of theory development, research practice and critique. The article starts by disentangling the different meanings of the notion of ‘discourse’ in ‘discourse theory’, clarifying the specificities of discourse theory as a theoretical and analytic…
Logics, discourse theory and methods: Advances, challenges and ways forward
Logics of Critical Explanation proposed a methodological approach that could render the insights of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) and post-Marxist political theory more conducive to critical empirical research. It also offered a language with which to counter positivist tendencies to colonize the space of methods and research strategies, showing how PDT could facilitate both explanatory and critical endeavours. Since its publication in…
An introduction to the special issue on ‘Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice
This article introduces the special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics on ‘Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice.’ In this introduction we discuss the aims and structure of this special issue focused on the development of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory originally developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
Valuation practices and the cooptation charge: Quantification and monetization as political logics
Discourse Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Logics of Critical Explanation
Two interviews
The Retroductive Cycle: The Research Process in Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis
Critical Fantasy Studies: Neoliberalism, education and identification - an interview with Jason Glynos
Interview with Professor Jason Glynos, co-director of the Center for Ideology and Discourse Analysis (CIDA) at the University of Essex, UK, conducted by professors Joanildo Burity (FUNDAJ) and Gustavo Gilson Oliveira (UFPE). The interview explores the contours, the conceptual framework and the analytic strategies being developed in relation to the so-called Critical Fantasy Studies’ field, associated with his recent work. It seeks to investigate,…
Two for joy: Towards a better understanding of free associative methods as sites of transference in empirical research
Critical research on populism: Nine rules of engagement
This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse-theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form …
Psychical contexts of subjectivity and performative practices of remuneration: Teaching assistants’ narratives of work
A range of sociological work has theorized neoliberal regulative regimes, suggesting the contradictions contained in the enactment of policy and foregrounding the painful effects of these processes on subjectivities produced within performative school cultures. This paper contributes to this body of work by tracing the movement of desire in teaching assistants’ subjective relations to workplace practices of remuneration. We do this through an ana…
Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s …
Discourse, explanation and critique
It is often alleged that post-structuralist discourse theory suffers from a methodological and a normative deficit, making it unable to either explain or criticize and evaluate the policy practices and regimes it investigates. We challenge such claims, arguing instead that post-structuralist discourse theory is both explanatory and critical. We begin by providing a quick sketch of how the ontological assumptions of post-structuralist discourse th…
The grip of ideology: A Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology
Is it possible to say something about how an ideology grips subjects that goes beyond today's sophisticated accounts of how particular socio-political traditions have been contingently constituted? This paper explores how a Lacanian conceptual framework provides the resources with which to offer an affirmative response to this question. In outlining such a response, I rely on Slavoj ̃ i — ek's political re-articulations of psychoanalytic categori…
Ideological fantasy at work
This paper explores the normative and ideological significance of fantasy in the context of workplace practices. I situate my approach to fantasy against the background of a 'logics approach' to social analysis, which is grounded in the post-structuralist and post-marxist genres of political theorizing. In considering a number of existing analyses of workplace practices which appeal to the category of fantasy, I focus on some studies in which fan…
Critical fantasy studies
Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the categor…
Structure, Agency and Power in Political Analysis: Beyond Contextualised Self-Interpretations
This article evaluates Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes’ interpretive approach to political analysis by examining their account of social change. Their work is significant because they have endeavoured to construct a distinctive approach which strikes a productive balance between philosophical reflection and analytical attention to the empirical domain. Moreover, in elaborating their approach, Bevir and Rhodes wage a war along a number of fronts: positi…
Beyond populism studies
Populism’ has become ever more ubiquitous in political analysis, to the extent that ‘populism studies’ appears on course to establishing itself as a field of research in its own right. This article warns about the dangers of such a development. Taking a discourse theoretical approach as our starting point – but also critically engaging with this tradition’s contribution to the hype about populism – we suggest that ‘populism studies’ (and the preo…
Logics, discourse theory and methods: Advances, challenges and ways forward
Logics of Critical Explanation proposed a methodological approach that could render the insights of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) and post-Marxist political theory more conducive to critical empirical research. It also offered a language with which to counter positivist tendencies to colonize the space of methods and research strategies, showing how PDT could facilitate both explanatory and critical endeavours. Since its publication in…
Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter
This article explores the implications that a particular psychoanalytic insight carries for thinking about freedom in general and Charles Taylor's approach to freedom in particular. Courtesy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this insight supplies a logic of enjoyment to explain an aspect of the problem of self-transgression – a problem summarising those situations in which a subject appears both to affirm an ideal and, at the same time, …
Moving discourse theory forward: A five-track proposal for future research
This article assesses the current state of play of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory associated with Laclau and Mouffe and the ‘Essex school’, and identifies ways forward at the level of theory development, research practice and critique. The article starts by disentangling the different meanings of the notion of ‘discourse’ in ‘discourse theory’, clarifying the specificities of discourse theory as a theoretical and analytic…
Logics in policy and practice: A critical nodal analysis of the UK banking reform process
Drawing on the ‘logics approach’ to advance critical policy studies, we contribute to our understanding of the banking reform process in the wake of the financial crisis. We focus on the political and ideological dimensions of this process, paying particular attention to the way the narrow character of associated debates is produced and maintained. We operationalize the logics approach by invoking a ‘nodal framework’ that apprehends the banking s…
Cooling Out the Marks: The Ideology and Politics of the Financial Crisis
Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from…
Discourse, explanation and critique
It is often alleged that post-structuralist discourse theory suffers from a methodological and a normative deficit, making it unable to either explain or criticize and evaluate the policy practices and regimes it investigates. We challenge such claims, arguing instead that post-structuralist discourse theory is both explanatory and critical. We begin by providing a quick sketch of how the ontological assumptions of post-structuralist discourse th…
Ideology as blocked mourning: Greek national identity in times of economic crisis and austerity
This article approaches the 2010–2014 economic crisis in Greece from the perspective of loss and mourning, critically exploring what questions and insights this provokes. We argue first that the rhetoric of mainstream political and media elites has been instrumental in framing responses to the Greek economic crisis in patriotic terms, a frame subsequently adopted by groups from across the entire political spectrum, whether part of the establishme…
Varieties of co-production in public services: Time banks in a UK health policy context
Time banking is a third-sector initiative that enacts principles of co-production and offers a model with which to understand how users can become actively involved with professionals and other stakeholders in the delivery of public services. This article explores possible lines of tension between principles that underpin time banking practices and principles informing the health policy field in the United Kingdom. We develop a framework rooted i…
Logics of marginalisation in health and social care reform: Integration, choice, and provider-blind provision
The period 2010–2013 was a time of far-reaching structural reforms of the National Health Service in England. Of particular interest in this paper is the way in which radical critiques of the reform process were marginalised by pragmatic concerns about how to maintain the market-competition thrust of the reforms while avoiding potential fragmentation. We draw on the Essex school of political discourse theory and develop a ‘nodal’ analytical frame…
Hating government and voting against one’s interests: Self-Transgression, enjoyment, critique
Radical Democratic Ethos, or, What is an Authentic Political Act
Anti-populist fantasies: Interrogating Veja 's discursive constructions, from Lula to Bolsonaro
In this paper we draw on the concept of fantasy and the principles of political discourse theory to develop an analytical framework for the study of Veja's anti-populist discourse. As one of Brazil's most influential publications in elite policy-making circles, Veja exerts considerable influence over the way populist politics is portrayed and understood. By tracking the signifiers 'populism' and 'populist' in the pages of this weekly magazine, ou…
Neoliberalism, markets, fantasy: The case of health and social care
On the ideological and political significance of fantasy in the organization of work
Self-Transgression and freedom
This essay sketches out the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis can have a productive bearing on the analysis of political issues in general, and questions of freedom in particular. The article takes its bearings from a broad research problem ? the problem of self-transgression ? that can be said to structure the work of a wide range of social and political analysts. The problem of self-transgression aims to capture an intuition about those kind…
Psychical contexts of subjectivity and performative practices of remuneration: Teaching assistants’ narratives of work
A range of sociological work has theorized neoliberal regulative regimes, suggesting the contradictions contained in the enactment of policy and foregrounding the painful effects of these processes on subjectivities produced within performative school cultures. This paper contributes to this body of work by tracing the movement of desire in teaching assistants’ subjective relations to workplace practices of remuneration. We do this through an ana…
Navigating desires beyond growth: The Critical Role of Fantasy in Degrowth’s Environmental Politics and Prefigurative Ethics
As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement contests the hegemony of economic growth. Much scholarship has sought to unpack degrowth's proposals to reduce matter and energy throughput and to promote socio-ecological justice, democracy and wellbeing. Few studies, however, examine how the movement sustains itself. In this article, therefore, we explore the role fantasy plays in the movement's emergence and sustenance. We dr…
An introduction to the special issue on ‘Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice
This article introduces the special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics on ‘Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice.’ In this introduction we discuss the aims and structure of this special issue focused on the development of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory originally developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
Valuation practices and the cooptation charge: Quantification and monetization as political logics
There is no Other of the Other' Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek's Anti-capitalism
Sexual identity, identification and difference: A psychoanalytic contribution to discourse theory
This essay focuses on an issue arising from within an anti-essentialist perspective on sexual identity: how is it possible to explain the political impetus inhering in a category such as ‘woman’ without having recourse to a set of positive properties that would somehow fix her identity in advance? I examine how a particular theoretical outlook, social post-modernism, attempts to address this issue, and argue that, ultimately, social postmodernism…
The grip of ideology: A Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology
Is it possible to say something about how an ideology grips subjects that goes beyond today's sophisticated accounts of how particular socio-political traditions have been contingently constituted? This paper explores how a Lacanian conceptual framework provides the resources with which to offer an affirmative response to this question. In outlining such a response, I rely on Slavoj ̃ i — ek's political re-articulations of psychoanalytic categori…
Postures and Impostures: On Lacan's Style and Use of Mathematical Science
Postures and Impostures not a jot in enlisting mathematical science to his cause, this cannot but seem to add insult to injury
There is no Other of the Other' Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek's Anti-capitalism
Self-Transgression and freedom
This essay sketches out the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis can have a productive bearing on the analysis of political issues in general, and questions of freedom in particular. The article takes its bearings from a broad research problem ? the problem of self-transgression ? that can be said to structure the work of a wide range of social and political analysts. The problem of self-transgression aims to capture an intuition about those kind…
Radical Democratic Ethos, or, What is an Authentic Political Act
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory
This book proposes a novel approach to practising social and political analysis based on the role of logics. The authors articulate a distinctive perspective on social science explanation that avoids the problems of scientism and subjectivism by steering a careful course between lawlike explanations and thick descriptions. Drawing upon hermeneutics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and post-analytical philosophy, this new approach offers a part…
Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory
Structure, Agency and Power in Political Analysis: Beyond Contextualised Self-Interpretations
This article evaluates Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes’ interpretive approach to political analysis by examining their account of social change. Their work is significant because they have endeavoured to construct a distinctive approach which strikes a productive balance between philosophical reflection and analytical attention to the empirical domain. Moreover, in elaborating their approach, Bevir and Rhodes wage a war along a number of fronts: positi…
Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter
This article explores the implications that a particular psychoanalytic insight carries for thinking about freedom in general and Charles Taylor's approach to freedom in particular. Courtesy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this insight supplies a logic of enjoyment to explain an aspect of the problem of self-transgression – a problem summarising those situations in which a subject appears both to affirm an ideal and, at the same time, …
Ideological fantasy at work
This paper explores the normative and ideological significance of fantasy in the context of workplace practices. I situate my approach to fantasy against the background of a 'logics approach' to social analysis, which is grounded in the post-structuralist and post-marxist genres of political theorizing. In considering a number of existing analyses of workplace practices which appeal to the category of fantasy, I focus on some studies in which fan…
Politics and the unconscious
Politics and the unconscious – An interview with Ernesto Laclau
On the ideological and political significance of fantasy in the organization of work
Varieties of co-production in public services: Time banks in a UK health policy context
Time banking is a third-sector initiative that enacts principles of co-production and offers a model with which to understand how users can become actively involved with professionals and other stakeholders in the delivery of public services. This article explores possible lines of tension between principles that underpin time banking practices and principles informing the health policy field in the United Kingdom. We develop a framework rooted i…
Cooling Out the Marks: The Ideology and Politics of the Financial Crisis
Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from…
Hating government and voting against one’s interests: Self-Transgression, enjoyment, critique
Neoliberalism, markets, fantasy: The case of health and social care
Logics in policy and practice: A critical nodal analysis of the UK banking reform process
Drawing on the ‘logics approach’ to advance critical policy studies, we contribute to our understanding of the banking reform process in the wake of the financial crisis. We focus on the political and ideological dimensions of this process, paying particular attention to the way the narrow character of associated debates is produced and maintained. We operationalize the logics approach by invoking a ‘nodal framework’ that apprehends the banking s…
Logics of marginalisation in health and social care reform: Integration, choice, and provider-blind provision
The period 2010–2013 was a time of far-reaching structural reforms of the National Health Service in England. Of particular interest in this paper is the way in which radical critiques of the reform process were marginalised by pragmatic concerns about how to maintain the market-competition thrust of the reforms while avoiding potential fragmentation. We draw on the Essex school of political discourse theory and develop a ‘nodal’ analytical frame…
Discourse, explanation and critique
It is often alleged that post-structuralist discourse theory suffers from a methodological and a normative deficit, making it unable to either explain or criticize and evaluate the policy practices and regimes it investigates. We challenge such claims, arguing instead that post-structuralist discourse theory is both explanatory and critical. We begin by providing a quick sketch of how the ontological assumptions of post-structuralist discourse th…
Death talk’, ‘loss talk’ and identification in the process of ageing
In this paper, we examine the injunction issued by the prominent politician, broadcaster and older people's advocate, Baroness Joan Bakewell, to engage in ‘death talk’. We see positive ethical potential in this injunction, insofar as it serves as a call to confront more directly the prospects of death and dying, thereby releasing creative energies with which to change our outlook on life and ageing more generally. However, when set against a cult…
Ideology as blocked mourning: Greek national identity in times of economic crisis and austerity
This article approaches the 2010–2014 economic crisis in Greece from the perspective of loss and mourning, critically exploring what questions and insights this provokes. We argue first that the rhetoric of mainstream political and media elites has been instrumental in framing responses to the Greek economic crisis in patriotic terms, a frame subsequently adopted by groups from across the entire political spectrum, whether part of the establishme…
Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s …
Critical research on populism: Nine rules of engagement
This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse-theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form …
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (39 works) · Politics (36 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Law (31 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Psychoanalysis (15 works)