Arts, Culture and the Environment MA

Year of entry: 2026

Course length: 12 months full-time

About the course

In an era of climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, global pandemic, and social inequality driven by ecological change, how the environment intersects with humanistic questions of culture, values, ethics, and social responsibility is more important than ever.

Combining the study of the environment with methodologies from the arts, on the MA in Arts, Culture and the Environment, you will explore the role played by culture in shaping attitudes towards and responses to environmental change across a wide range of historical and geographic contexts.

Dr Ingrid Hanson

Lecturer in English Literature MA Arts, Culture and the Environment Course Director

Ingrid Hanson’s research and teaching lie at the intersection of literature, politics and culture, mainly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is a lecturer in English literature, author of William Morris and the Uses of Violence (Anthem Press, 2014) and editor of William Morris: Selected Works (OUP, 2024) as well as co-editor of Poetry, Politics and Pictures (Peter Lang, 2013).

She has published work on ecological/political thinking at the Victorian fin de siècle, and on violence, peace, masculinities, medievalism, mourning and socialist utopianism. She is currently working on a book project on political and literary constructions of peace (including land justice and ecologies of peace) in the long nineteenth century, entitled Disturbing the Peace.

In 2024-5, she was a Primary Investigator, with Anke Bernau and Aurora Frederiksen, on Moss Worlds, an interdisciplinary, collaborative project exploring the politics, aesthetics and histories of urban moss. Her teaching is collaborative, active and interactive: she regularly teaches outside the seminar room, including taking students on lichen and moss walks and trips to botanical and historical archives as a way into thinking creatively about texts. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Dr Jenna Ashton

Senior Lecturer in Heritage Studies and Course Unit Lead for Creative Ecologies

Dr Jenna C. Ashton is a Senior Lecturer in Heritage Studies, with a background in art-making and writing, exhibition curation, creative producing, public engagement, and arts-education.

Her multi-method, multimodal creative ethnography and interdisciplinary research focuses on community-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:

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 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 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.