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, multimodal creative ethnography and interdisciplinary research focuses on community and place-based practices, knowledges, and economies (or "living/ intangible" heritages), and critical literacies. Jenna's work sits across cultural analysis, feminist environmental humanities, and critical heritage studies. Specific interests and contributions include:

• Practice-based research methodology and analysis.
• BioCultural heritage: environments, practices, and materialisation
• 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 more-than-human losses
• Emotional ecology of heritage
• Vibrant materiality and material literacies
• Gendered and feminist practices and networks of action
• Imaginary and embodied geographies
• Models of andragogy and pedagogy for heritage management and reflexive praxis
• Ecoliteracy and place-based learning
• Folk and community arts/ arts of the everyday/ creative geographies

Jenna is an Associate Member of the UoM Sustainable Consumption Institute, and Member of the UoM Manchester Urban Institute - Co-Director of the MUI Feminist Collective. From 2022-2025, Jenna was the Research Lead for Creative and Civic Futures for UoM research platform “Creative Manchester”. 

Externally, she is a Member of the RGS Animal Geographies Working Group, a Member of the Social Farms & Gardens academic working group, and a Member of the Greater Manchester Food Programme Board. She has been a founding Trustee of charity Delia Derbyshire Day since 2015. 

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 is currently working through UNICEF's Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) Advanced Learning Pathway Certificate.

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

Belinda Scarlett: Space to Talk About Class: Activating New Working Class Movements in Heritage Settings (Main Supervisor)

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)

Bhanu Ghalot : Dissonant Histories in South Asia’s Museums: Memory, Religion and Politics in the ‘1947 Partition Memorialisation Project’ in India (Internal Assessor)

Matthew Smith : Das Auto, the People’s Car: DIY heritage car restoration and wellbeing (Internal Assessor)

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