Jonathan Benney

Me

I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where I started to study Chinese. In 1998 I started Arts and Law degrees at Melbourne (and a Diploma of Modern Languages in Japanese). Unfortunately I've forgotten most of the Japanese, and fortunately most of the law. In Arts, I majored in Chinese and went on exchange to Taiwan. After finishing my degrees, I started working at various places, and did Honours in Chinese part-time, finishing in November 2005. (My Honours thesis can be read here.) I used to work for the university's Marketing and Recruitment (Onshore) department as one of two Schools Program Officers.

I started a PhD in Chinese in 2006 under the supervision of Associate Professor Anne McLaren and Dr Pradeep Taneja, investigating weiquan, or "rights defence", in contemporary China. An article on this ("Rights defence and the virtual China") was published in a special issue of the Asian Studies Review late in 2007. The thesis should be submitted in December 2009.

Very occasionally I write and edit various things, including for Farrago and its creative writing publication above water. I spend some of my time watching kids debate and sometimes talking to them about it.

Of late I have become increasingly interested in promoting atheism.

Academic work

Vaguely speaking, some of the things I research (or try to) are: Asian identity, democratisation, diaspora, new media in Asia, protest and resistance in China, legal consciousness, and rights consciousness. The use of strategy in social movements is increasingly interesting me.

Apart from working on my PhD, I used to be one of the administrators of the Asian Studies Review, working with the editor, Dr Maila Stivens.

I've worked on some research assistant projects for my supervisor Anne McLaren at the Asia Institute: one is the yearly ASAA Asian languages university enrolments research project (see here for coverage of 2005's project, which I worked on with Anne and Professor Robin Jeffrey of La Trobe). I've also done some work on wanghun or "net marriages" and on the teaching of international studies at university.

At one stage I was the president of the Chinese Studies Research Group. The CSRG runs regular seminars with the assistance of the wonderful people at the East Asian Collection of the University library.

I am kept busy lecturing and tutoring. I am currently the lecturer for Classic Chinese Civilization. I have lectured in Strategies for Business and Bureaucracy and assisted in the teaching of Politics and Business in Post-Mao China. I have also tutored in Inventing Asian Traditions, Chinese Politics and Society, China Since Mao, and occasionally in Introduction to Literary Chinese.

Recreations (not all at once)

Asia. Cricket. Debating. Music. Travel. TV. Writing. Yoga. Geeky stuff. The collapse of capitalism.

Contact

Various everyday activities are chronicled here.

jbenney at unimelb dot edu dot au or jbenney at gmail dot com