Who is Lisa?

Urban-born and wilderness-shaped, Lisa Fenton is a mother, scholar, and practitioner at the forefront of exploring how bushcraft and Indigenous knowledges can reconnect people with the natural world.

Lisa Fenton is an academic, bushcraft practitioner, and cultural thinker whose work explores how practical, place-based skills shape human ways of knowing. Drawing on Indigenous ontologies and long traditions of making, she researches and teaches how enskillment—learning through the hands, the senses, and relationship—cultivates resilience, responsibility, and kinship with the living world.

She has advised on major media productions, delivered keynotes internationally, and led university programmes in outdoor and experiential learning. Her scholarship weaves ethnography, material culture, and environmental humanities to examine bushcraft as a radical, restorative pedagogy and as a thread of cultural continuity.

Alongside academic writing, Lisa teaches craft- and land-based practices—tracking, friction fire, foraging, and fieldcraft—inviting students to develop attentiveness, ecological imagination, and ethical relations with place.

Lisa is leading the field in exploring the relationship between Bushcraft & Indigenous Knowledges, land-based survival technologies, and bushcraft skills for education and wellbeing. Having written the first doctorate in the Ethnobiology of Bushcraft and its relationship with traditional ecological knowledge systems, Lisa has created a Postgraduate MA Bushcraft pathway, offered by the University of Cumbria, Institute for Science, Natural Resources & Outdoor Studies.

Far from being an Ivory-tower academic, however, Dr. Lisa Fenton has instructed bushcraft and survival techniques for three decades, drawing from a wealth of experience that includes teaching thousands of students, across all major biomes, as well as leading international conservation projects, and contributing to mainstream media developments.

Lisa is passionate about the importance of integrating bushcraft and survival field-skills with academic insight into the histories, relationship to Indigenous knowledges, philosophical and theoretical contexts. The Ethnosphere, with all its diversity, is intricately connected with the diversity of the biosphere. The relationship between these two spheres, she suggests, is one of traditional, folk, indigenous knowledge, perceptions and land-based skill. This, Lisa says, is critical in our future consideration for Re-wilding landscape ecologies. Dr Lisa Fenton is uniquely skilled and is excited to explore new opportunities that develop our relationship with nature.

After serving her apprenticeship with Ray Mears, and the world-renown Woodlore organisation, Lisa created and ran her own bushcraft educational body, Woodsmoke, in the Lake District National Park for 17 years. During that period she took an MSc in Ethnobotany from the University of Kent and in conjunction with Kew Gardens. Exceptionally, she was invited to continue to study for her doctorate full-time in the department for Conservation & Anthropology, as part of the Durrell Institute of Conservation & Ecology. Her research in Bushcraft & Indigenous Knowledge was considered to have made a completely new contribution to knowledge, and following her completion, she took up her current post as a member of academic staff at the University of Cumbria, at the beautiful Ambleside campus, set in the heart of the Lake District National Park. She is a lecturer across undergraduate Outdoor Studies degree programs and postgraduate Experiential and Outdoor Learning Masters degree.

Lisa is a leading choice for press, radio, and television commentary on all bushcraft and outdoor survival issues. She has been featured on Channel 4’s Loose Women, Russel Brand radio X, in The Times, BBC Countryfile podcasts, Radio 4 Women’s Hour and most recently has been asked to co-host the 2022 Global Bushcraft Symposium in the UK.

Current Projects

Keynotes & Workshops — Speaking internationally on survival, preparedness, friluftsliv, and the ethics of practice. Recent engagements include the Global Bushcraft Symposium (Sweden, 2025) and the Danish Bushcraft Symposium (2025).

Media & Consultancy — Advising productions and engaging the public on heritage skills and human–nature relationships. Recent work includes filming with Oxford University Press for English File on outdoor adventure, where Lisa was featured alongside experts such as Benedict Cumberbatch (acting) and Mary Beard (history).

Research — Co-investigator on a two-year British Academy–funded project exploring tourism and its impact on rural ethnic groups in Northern Vietnam.

Teaching — Supervising and lecturing in Outdoor & Experiential Learning at the University of Cumbria, with a focus on enskillment and Indigenous-informed methodologies.