email: [email protected] 

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

Dr Jenna C. Ashton is a Senior Lecturer in Heritage Studies and an arts-practice researcher working on cultural analysis and theory at the nexus between community heritage, civic ecologies, place, and social and environmental justice. She is also working on grief and bereavement practices. She has a background in artmaking and writing, exhibition curation, creative producing, and arts-education.

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. These projects focus on urban green infrastructure and health, community climate resilience, reforestation, biodiversity enhancement, weeds, air qualities and atmospheres, human-animal multispecies encounters, food sovereignty, environmental histories, historic gardens and cultural landscapes, feminism, museums and heritage, and refugee and displacement lived experiences. Jenna has also trained in agroforestry "forest garden" design, permaculture, and ecology, and grief and loss coaching and support. She is a member of the Greater Manchester Food Sovereignty project group, facilitates the Miles Platting Community and Age Friendly Network climate action group, is an Advisor for the National Trust, a Trustee for Delia Derbyshire Day, and volunteers for the Blue Cross’ Pet Loss Support Service.

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 and environmental humanities, critical 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