Lisa is lecturer across Outdoor Studies degree programs, both undergraduate and postgraduate, at the University of Cumbria. In 2019, Lisa developed a Bushcraft pathway of the Masters Programme in Outdoor and Experiential Learning; currently running from the beautiful Ambleside campus. Lisa is both an academic and practitioner of wilderness survival and bushcraft skills. She combines her academic background in ethnobiology and anthropology with her long-standing field experience in bushcraft and wilderness survival skills. Initially serving her apprenticeship with Ray Mears, Lisa then co-created her own bushcraft organisation 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, and continued to study for her doctorate in Bushcraft & Indigenous Knowledge.
Through both her academic research, and through a myriad of local and global experiences that ranges across a variety of remote environments, Lisa feels sure that bushcraft engenders a way of being in landscape ecologies that knits us closely into the very fabric of materials and conditions of our natural environment. Learning from peoples who have retained the skills to live in and utilise the vast possibilities a landscape can afford us, for clothes, tools, food, medicines, and shelter, Lisa advocates an approach to bushcraft skill and study that respectfully moves towards these traditional ecological knowledges.
