Jennifer Dodsworth

Jenny’s current DPhil research focuses on the digital, cultural, and environmental geographies of rural landscapes. Her thesis examines the extent to which dominant representations and mediations of the Lake District National Park as a romanticised rural landscape have been continued through contemporary digital mechanisms of communication such as social media. The overarching aim of her thesis is to develop a digital ecology of the ‘#LakeDistrict’, by exploring how these powerful imaginaries may be contested by local rural communities whose perspectives are absent in digital media, namely the fell farming families whose Herdwick sheep are often the subject of intense debate regarding the Lake District’s management. Jenny’s current research utilises a diverse range of experimental research methods, from large-scale digital analyses of existing online #LakeDistricts, to collaborative digital image elicitation with rural communities. Her studies address how social media inherits and transforms power relations between media and rural space, and how we might rematerialise a local, more-than-human account of the rural in the contemporary English context.