{"id":1317,"date":"2026-05-12T21:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/?p=1317"},"modified":"2026-05-09T15:16:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T14:16:24","slug":"introducing-dr-lena-ferriday-research-associate-on-accessing-the-wellbeing-commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/2026\/05\/12\/introducing-dr-lena-ferriday-research-associate-on-accessing-the-wellbeing-commons\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Dr Lena Ferriday: Research Associate on Accessing the Wellbeing Commons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In April 2026, we welcomed\u00a0Dr Lena\u00a0Ferriday<\/a>, who\u00a0joins\u00a0the Collective as\u00a0a\u00a0Research Associate.\u00a0She has joined us from King\u2019s College London, where she has been Lecturer in the History of Science and the Environment for the past year\u00a0following completion of her doctorate at the University of Bristol.\u00a0Inspired by the research within the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bristol\u00a0during her undergraduate studies, she took an interest in environmental history with a focus on sensory experience.\u00a0She is particularly interested in questions of how\u00a0individuals have made\u00a0claims to\u00a0environmental knowledge\u00a0in modern Britain, and the role tangible encounters between bodies and matter have played in this process.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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Her current monograph project examines how the rural environments of South-West England came to acquire meanings through embodied practice through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While her individual research has not been oral history-based \u2014 thus far \u2014 she was involved in several Bristol-based oral history projects, exploring individuals\u2019 experiences of caving in the Mendips and of the gas industry in south Bristol. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lena has joined Newcastle as Research Associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded project \u2018Accessing the Wellbeing Commons: <\/a>Therapeutic Resource-ification of Natural and Historic Environments and Social Exclusion in the UK and Inner Asia\u2019. The project will explore how the natural environment\u2019s health benefits have been historically constructed and seeks to reveal the barriers communities face in accessing these spaces. It does so by approaching watery spaces as sites where social categories like class and ethnicity are configured in specific historical encounters and bound up with a capitalist production of value. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lena leads the UK work package and will be conducting oral history interviews on wild swimming in Devon, and social inequalities in the recent past, for the UK part of the project. She hopes to start her fieldwork in May, which will entail daily ethnographic encounters with communities who have a stake in Dartmoor\u2019s lakes, rivers and reservoirs, whether as regular users, visitors, regulators, or activists. She will accompany this research by undertaking 10 oral history interviews, with those who have a sustained or long-term involvement in issues of access to these spaces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Raised beach at Prawle Point, Devon, by Edmund Shaw. Licensed under CC-BY-2.0. Available at geograph.org.uk<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Whilst the archive holds extensive materials on the management of water systems on Dartmoor, and the evolving histories of access to the National Park in the late twentieth century, there is much less that reveals individuals\u2019 experiences of these spaces across the past century. Lena is keen to use oral history to bring this experiential dimension to the fore, uncovering how the embodied experiences of swimming might have changed in relation to the political dynamics that historians have more often attributed to these spaces. Doing so, she hopes, will offer insight into how the relationship between water and health was imagined and practiced in this period.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In April 2026, we welcomed\u00a0Dr Lena\u00a0Ferriday, who\u00a0joins\u00a0the Collective as\u00a0a\u00a0Research Associate.\u00a0She has joined us from King\u2019s College London, where she has been Lecturer in the History of Science and the Environment for the past year\u00a0following completion of her doctorate at the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12013,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,165],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-research","category-staff-news","tag-oral-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12013"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1321,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions\/1321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}