Judith A Bennett
Biographic Data
| ID | 457241 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Judith A Bennett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Judith A |
| FAMILY NAME | Bennett |
| SIGNATURE | BENNETT J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Otago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2426-7071 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 33 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Tonga’s Monarchy and the Country’s Coconut Industry, c. 1945 to Independence
Coconuts were the basis of Tonga’s economy before and after the Second World War. After that war, Queen Sālote’s eldest son, Prince Tungī, sought to speed modernization partly by investing in processing coconuts and copra in Tonga and overseas. Tonga’s Copra Board was pivotal to this. Although it found markets after the British Ministry of Food (MOF) contracts ended, the Board permitted a proportion of its copra price stabilization fund to be exp…
Quantifying air quality co-benefits to industrial decarbonization
Introduction Many decarbonization technologies have the added co-benefit of reducing short-lived climate pollutants, such as particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NO x ), and sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), creating a unique opportunity for identifying strategies that promote both climate change solutions and opportunities for air quality improvement. However, stakeholders and decision-makers may struggle to quantify how these co-benefits will impact…
QED , the Culture Wars, and a Renewed Focus on the Local
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” This famous passage from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin resonates as we pay homage to QED's first decade. In the opening to his novel, Isherwood is looking onto the street from his dwelling, much like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, playing voyeur to his neighbors’ movements while being seduced by the hum of city life. Although contemporary audiences might qui…
Utopia, Apocalypse, and Queer Effacement on The Last of Us
Producers of science fiction and fantasy have long employed the trope of alternative timelines to drive plots, develop characters, and maintain viewer interest. From the ancient futurism of Battlestar Galactica to the eerie ruination of Planet of the Apes, the best artistic works compel audiences to contemplate their relationship to the narrative arc and the implications of divergent temporalities. What if human abuses of the natural world lead t…
The medicalization of the culture wars
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies was a product of the 9/11 era. In this article, I consider the ways the COVID-19 pandemic displaced 9/11 as the defining event of our time and, in the process, fundamentally altered the intellectual landscape for producing scholarship. The so-called culture wars provide a compelling case study for assessing this contextual transformation. Building on the writings of Paul Preciado, I engage the new-found…
The Ethnographic Experiment
In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later w…
Resisting the rhetoric of indexing
Healthcare has traditionally been structured by biopolitical processes of indexing. The rhetorical practice of indexing stratifies bodies into risk categories and determines who has access to services and at what cost. Indexing generalizes features of identity, artificially classifying them into risk categories to maximize corporate profits. This dubious process accounts for traditional matters of health such as disease and illness, but also asse…
Mourning and memorializing in the Covid-19 era
This short essay engages the efforts of artists, activists, and mourners to memorialize those who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. These commemorative sites provide needed correctives to the physical absences, political opportunism, and statistical abstractions that have tended to personify the pandemic. As with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the tropes of individualism and tactility materialize frequently in conversations about these displays. …
Everyday life and the management of risky bodies in the Covid-19 era
This essay explores how public reception of, and individual resistance to, public health mandates have reinforced agentic notions of bodily management in the COVID-19 era. Our collective approach to the pandemic continues to secure prevalent understandings of human agency over disease and illness by reifying the concept of personal choice. Notions of risk and shame shape these performances but do little to dislodge cultural frames that reify noti…
Fluid Frontiers and Uncertain Geographies
US policies of immigrant exclusion evolved from the so-called Asiatic barred zone of 1917 to the Asian ‘triangle’, but also included people of the Island Pacific. In the latter case, the test for eligibility to enter the United States (US) as a potential citizen was race based. World War II induced pressures by US citizens in the occupying armed forces for marriage to both Asian and Pacific Island women. Internal lobbying in the US plus diplomati…
Introduction
Introduction| October 01 2020 Introduction: How to Survive a Presidency Jeffrey A. Bennett Jeffrey A. Bennett Jeffrey A. Bennett (he/him/his) is associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease (New York University Press) and Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (University of Alabama Press). His work has also appeared…
Growing Coconut Palms in the Pacific Islands
Coconuts provided commodities for the West in the form of coconut oil and copra. Once colonial governments established control of the tropical Pacific Islands, they needed revenue so urged European settlers to establish coconut plantations. For some decades most copra came from Indigenous growers. Administrations constantly urged the people to thin old groves and plant new ones like plantations, in grid patterns, regularly spaced and weeded. Loca…
Containing Sotomayor
This essay explores how rhetorics of diabetes management informed Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial persona during her ascent to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were clouded famously by institutional racism and sexism. She was accused repeatedly by congressional Republicans of being intemperate, emotional, and illogical in a judicial sphere that prizes circumspection, deliberateness, and collegiality. As part of a larger strategy to…
Voices of Rotuma
Polynesian Rotuma was blessed by its large coconuts and became an early focus for foreigners seeking trade in coconut oil and copra. Once the island became part of British Fiji in 1881, Rotumans voiced their concerns about increased shipping costs when going via Fiji as the port of entry. From the early 20th century they had visions of owning their own ship and thus greater control over prices for exported copra and imported goods. This article s…
Pacific Coconut
As the title implies this special issue concentrates on the coconut in its older usages and its transformation into commodities. The coconut has many histories, with specific intersections with each Pacific island society, indeed each community and family. This brief introduction seeks to give an overview of its penetration into the lives and societies at several levels, from small clans to major companies, from growers to governments, all implic…
Isles of Amnesia
"Isles of Amnesia: the history, geography, and restoration of America’s forgotten Pacific Islands." The Journal of Pacific History, 52(1), pp. 120–121
Mothers' Darlings of the South Pacific
Like a human tsunami, World War II brought two million American servicemen to the South Pacific where they left a human legacy of some thousands of children. Mothers’ Darlings traces the intimate relationships that existed in the wartime South Pacific between U.S. servicemen and Indigenous women, and considers the fate of the resulting children. The American military command carefully managed intimate relationships in the Pacific Theater, applyin…
The History Manifesto
The History Manifesto is a stunning book. It is short and erudite and packs the essence of the humanities into fewer than 160 pages of text. A book with ‘Why should historians speak truth to power
Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War
Meditations
‘A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.’Johannes Tauler It seems that occasionally nodding can occur am
Natives and Exotics
Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand
A small group of Japanese civilian internees from the South Pacific were confined in New Zealand during World War II, with some being subsequently transferred to Australia in readiness for planned civilian exchanges with Japan. Most from Tonga had Japanese wives and children who were also detained in New Zealand. With one exception, all Japanese who had local wives and families were forced to leave them behind in either Tonga or Fiji. These famil…
Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance
This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit "men who have sex with other men" from donating blood. I argue that "passing" and "protest" are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both "passed" and "protested," the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understa…
Fears and aspirations
Very little study has been done of the role of US Intelligence in the South Pacific command in the Second World War. Collection of information on the civilian population concentrated mainly on settlers, sojourners and migrant labour, but military personnel also come under scrutiny. US intelligence collecting was at its most intense in New Caledonia, a major base for the US forces and a country rated as highly strategic by the Allies, especially i…
Love me gender
Advocates of "reparative therapy" employ a modified version of Judith Butler's "normative heterosexuality" discourse to "cure" gays and lesbians. Coupling Butler with a "coming out of homosexuality" personal narrative, reorientation texts such as Love Won Out construct a ubiquitous foundation for sexual identity and collective experience. At the text's conclusion, a tension is produced between a constitutive conception of identity and a more trad…
Love me gender
Advocates of "reparative therapy" employ a modified version of Judith Butler's "normative heterosexuality" discourse to "cure" gays and lesbians. Coupling Butler with a "coming out of homosexuality" personal narrative, reorientation texts such as Love Won Out construct a ubiquitous foundation for sexual identity and collective experience. At the text's conclusion, a tension is produced between a constitutive conception of identity and a more trad…
Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance
This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit "men who have sex with other men" from donating blood. I argue that "passing" and "protest" are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both "passed" and "protested," the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understa…
War, Emergency and the Environment
When World War Two broke out, Fiji's colonial administration assumed emergency powers to marshal the civilian population to produce goods and services for the war effort, particularly the support of American and New Zealand military personnel based there during 1942-43. This context of emergency framed land legislation revision, enabling the government at times to deal in a high-handed manner in resuming Fijian leased land for native reserves, ma…
Fluid Frontiers and Uncertain Geographies
US policies of immigrant exclusion evolved from the so-called Asiatic barred zone of 1917 to the Asian ‘triangle’, but also included people of the Island Pacific. In the latter case, the test for eligibility to enter the United States (US) as a potential citizen was race based. World War II induced pressures by US citizens in the occupying armed forces for marriage to both Asian and Pacific Island women. Internal lobbying in the US plus diplomati…
Growing Coconut Palms in the Pacific Islands
Coconuts provided commodities for the West in the form of coconut oil and copra. Once colonial governments established control of the tropical Pacific Islands, they needed revenue so urged European settlers to establish coconut plantations. For some decades most copra came from Indigenous growers. Administrations constantly urged the people to thin old groves and plant new ones like plantations, in grid patterns, regularly spaced and weeded. Loca…
Pacific Coconut
As the title implies this special issue concentrates on the coconut in its older usages and its transformation into commodities. The coconut has many histories, with specific intersections with each Pacific island society, indeed each community and family. This brief introduction seeks to give an overview of its penetration into the lives and societies at several levels, from small clans to major companies, from growers to governments, all implic…
Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand
A small group of Japanese civilian internees from the South Pacific were confined in New Zealand during World War II, with some being subsequently transferred to Australia in readiness for planned civilian exchanges with Japan. Most from Tonga had Japanese wives and children who were also detained in New Zealand. With one exception, all Japanese who had local wives and families were forced to leave them behind in either Tonga or Fiji. These famil…
Fears and aspirations
Very little study has been done of the role of US Intelligence in the South Pacific command in the Second World War. Collection of information on the civilian population concentrated mainly on settlers, sojourners and migrant labour, but military personnel also come under scrutiny. US intelligence collecting was at its most intense in New Caledonia, a major base for the US forces and a country rated as highly strategic by the Allies, especially i…
The grievous mistakes of the Vanikoro concession
The British Solomon Islands Protectorate government, in the 1910s, encouraged logging operations on Vanikolo in order to diversify the economy and extend government control in the easternmost islands. The Vanikoro Timber Company began operations in 1926 without any reforestation clause included in its licence. Problems with the assessment of royalties on trees felled in the 1930s drew the attention of the Colonial Office to this. Little could be …
Oscar Svensen
Instructional Sensitivity Expanded
The presently viewed role and utility of measures of instructional sensitivity were summarized. A case was made that the rationale for the assessment of instructional sensitivity can be applied to all achievement tests and should not continue to be restricted to criterion-referenced mastery tests. Next, a line of research and theory concerning context dependence in tests containing interpretive exercises was outlined. The logic of this theory was…
Wealth of the Solomons
Patrick Nunn, Environmental Change in the Pacific Basin
The grievous mistakes of the Vanikoro concession
The British Solomon Islands Protectorate government, in the 1910s, encouraged logging operations on Vanikolo in order to diversify the economy and extend government control in the easternmost islands. The Vanikoro Timber Company began operations in 1926 without any reforestation clause included in its licence. Problems with the assessment of royalties on trees felled in the 1930s drew the attention of the Colonial Office to this. Little could be …
Across the Bougainville Strait
In the years since political independence, the peoples of the border lands between Papua New Guinea and the Western Solomon Islands have had extensive and varied contacts, mirroring in their nature, if not their extent, more ancient linkages. From the mid-19th century European traders and local chiefs had collaborated to exploit these connections. Colonial annexation by Germany and Britain introduced constraints on free access across this border.…
War, Emergency and the Environment
When World War Two broke out, Fiji's colonial administration assumed emergency powers to marshal the civilian population to produce goods and services for the war effort, particularly the support of American and New Zealand military personnel based there during 1942-43. This context of emergency framed land legislation revision, enabling the government at times to deal in a high-handed manner in resuming Fijian leased land for native reserves, ma…
Wartime Emergency and the Displacement of Indians in Fiji
From 1939, under wartime regulations, land was resumed for military purposes in Fiji. Among the lands taken were plots leased by Indian tenant farmers from Fijians, mainly in western Viti Levu. In some cases this caused loss of livelihood and even destitution, as Indo-Fijian historian Brij V. Lal has shown in his book Broken Waves . Unlike Lal, this author argues that in spite of individual cases of suffering, Indians received adequate government…
Love me gender
Advocates of "reparative therapy" employ a modified version of Judith Butler's "normative heterosexuality" discourse to "cure" gays and lesbians. Coupling Butler with a "coming out of homosexuality" personal narrative, reorientation texts such as Love Won Out construct a ubiquitous foundation for sexual identity and collective experience. At the text's conclusion, a tension is produced between a constitutive conception of identity and a more trad…
Local Resource Use in the Pacific War with Japan
Americans have traditionally been the most wasteful people in the world. Now, however, we are fighting enemies who beat the world at squeezing what they want out of occupied territory. We must husband what we have, not only by avoiding waste, but also by the maximum utilization of local resources
Fears and aspirations
Very little study has been done of the role of US Intelligence in the South Pacific command in the Second World War. Collection of information on the civilian population concentrated mainly on settlers, sojourners and migrant labour, but military personnel also come under scrutiny. US intelligence collecting was at its most intense in New Caledonia, a major base for the US forces and a country rated as highly strategic by the Allies, especially i…
Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance
This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit "men who have sex with other men" from donating blood. I argue that "passing" and "protest" are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both "passed" and "protested," the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understa…
Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand
A small group of Japanese civilian internees from the South Pacific were confined in New Zealand during World War II, with some being subsequently transferred to Australia in readiness for planned civilian exchanges with Japan. Most from Tonga had Japanese wives and children who were also detained in New Zealand. With one exception, all Japanese who had local wives and families were forced to leave them behind in either Tonga or Fiji. These famil…
Natives and Exotics
Meditations
‘A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.’Johannes Tauler It seems that occasionally nodding can occur am
Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War
The History Manifesto
The History Manifesto is a stunning book. It is short and erudite and packs the essence of the humanities into fewer than 160 pages of text. A book with ‘Why should historians speak truth to power
Mothers' Darlings of the South Pacific
Like a human tsunami, World War II brought two million American servicemen to the South Pacific where they left a human legacy of some thousands of children. Mothers’ Darlings traces the intimate relationships that existed in the wartime South Pacific between U.S. servicemen and Indigenous women, and considers the fate of the resulting children. The American military command carefully managed intimate relationships in the Pacific Theater, applyin…
Isles of Amnesia
"Isles of Amnesia: the history, geography, and restoration of America’s forgotten Pacific Islands." The Journal of Pacific History, 52(1), pp. 120–121
Containing Sotomayor
This essay explores how rhetorics of diabetes management informed Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial persona during her ascent to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were clouded famously by institutional racism and sexism. She was accused repeatedly by congressional Republicans of being intemperate, emotional, and illogical in a judicial sphere that prizes circumspection, deliberateness, and collegiality. As part of a larger strategy to…
Voices of Rotuma
Polynesian Rotuma was blessed by its large coconuts and became an early focus for foreigners seeking trade in coconut oil and copra. Once the island became part of British Fiji in 1881, Rotumans voiced their concerns about increased shipping costs when going via Fiji as the port of entry. From the early 20th century they had visions of owning their own ship and thus greater control over prices for exported copra and imported goods. This article s…
Pacific Coconut
As the title implies this special issue concentrates on the coconut in its older usages and its transformation into commodities. The coconut has many histories, with specific intersections with each Pacific island society, indeed each community and family. This brief introduction seeks to give an overview of its penetration into the lives and societies at several levels, from small clans to major companies, from growers to governments, all implic…
Introduction
Introduction| October 01 2020 Introduction: How to Survive a Presidency Jeffrey A. Bennett Jeffrey A. Bennett Jeffrey A. Bennett (he/him/his) is associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease (New York University Press) and Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (University of Alabama Press). His work has also appeared…
Growing Coconut Palms in the Pacific Islands
Coconuts provided commodities for the West in the form of coconut oil and copra. Once colonial governments established control of the tropical Pacific Islands, they needed revenue so urged European settlers to establish coconut plantations. For some decades most copra came from Indigenous growers. Administrations constantly urged the people to thin old groves and plant new ones like plantations, in grid patterns, regularly spaced and weeded. Loca…
Everyday life and the management of risky bodies in the Covid-19 era
This essay explores how public reception of, and individual resistance to, public health mandates have reinforced agentic notions of bodily management in the COVID-19 era. Our collective approach to the pandemic continues to secure prevalent understandings of human agency over disease and illness by reifying the concept of personal choice. Notions of risk and shame shape these performances but do little to dislodge cultural frames that reify noti…
History (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Geography (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (9 works) · Business (7 works)