email: [email protected] 

I write, curate, perform, and make ...

Dr Jenna C. Ashton is a Senior Lecturer in Heritage Studies, with a background in artmaking and writing, exhibition curation, creative producing, public engagement, and arts-education. Her multi-method and interdisciplinary research focuses on community-based practices, knowledges, economies, and critical literacies (also sometimes described as "living heritage" or "intangible cultural heritage"). Jenna's work sits across feminist environmental humanities and critical heritage studies. Specific interests and contributions include:

• Political ecology of community environmental action and resilience
• Land stewardship and civic ecologies of restoration and care
• Economies and practices of food and resource gathering and sharing
• Multispecies community-making and expression
• Bereavement and grief practices for non-human losses
• Vibrant materiality and material literacies
• Gendered practices and networks of action
• Imaginary and embodied geographies
• Models of andragogy and pedagogy for heritage management and reflexive praxis.

Jenna is the Research Lead for Creative and Civic Futures for UoM research platform “Creative Manchester”, an Associate Member of the UoM Sustainable Consumption Institute, and Member of the UoM Manchester Urban Institute. Externally, she is a member of the RGS Animal Geographies Working Group.

Jenna has extensive experience of research collaboration across interdisciplinary arts-science teams, working as a PI, Co-I, and Advisor, and mentor and manager, on projects funded by AHRC, NERC, ESRC, Met Office, Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, and the Greater Manchester Green Spaces Fund.

Jenna has also trained in agroforestry "forest garden" design, permaculture design, anthrozoology, and grief and loss coaching and support. She volunteers with different groups and organisations. Jenna is the founder and Creative Director of the arts and heritage organisation Digital Women’s Archive North (2015 -), and in 2019-2020 in collaboration with women artists, she co-founded the Centre for International Women Artists, a collective artist studio and gallery experiment in Manchester, UK. Jenna is also 1/4 of artist collective InsideOutsideHouse (2018-).

Jenna teaches across courses focusing on critical heritage studies theory and practice, heritage policy and management, landscapes, environmental humanities, critical and creative ecologies, intangible cultural heritage, heritage and conflict, art curation, museums studies and practice, arts and the city, and contemporary arts.

PhD Students

Katy Jackson : Staffing discomfort: Care and emotion in museum work with narratives of conflict-related sexual violence (Main Supervisor)

Joe Traynor : The Strategy for Museums in Scotland; Cultural Policy, Nationhood and Value (Co-Supervisor)

Dr Catalina Delgado Rojas : State-Sponsored Symbolic Reparations. Creation and development of official memorialization spaces in Colombia (Main Supervisor, completed 2024)

Dr Gumring Hkanda : Conflicted Objects: histories of Violence, Trauma and Loss entangled in Kachin material culture from northern Burma/Myanma (1960 – Present) (Internal Assessor, completed 2024)

List of media, public talks, lectures, training 2020-24: DOCUMENT