Dr Jenny Barke (She/Her)

Jenny's research focuses on the methods and ethics of co-producing research with communities using participatory and creative research methods. She is particularly interested in the role of training and facilitation within community peer research approaches and how community engaged research can create impactful, rigorous and meaningful research.

Jenny is a psychologist who began her research career working in the field of visible difference and genetics at The Centre for Appearance Research. Through this work she became interested in co-producing research with communities and people with lived experience and has since worked in universities and the third sector exploring a range of research topics across health, social sciences, arts, and the humanities. Jenny has expertise in a range of qualitative research methods and much of her work has involved collaborating with arts practitioners, community organisations, and charities. 

Before joining the University of Exeter in 2024 Jenny was Head of Participatory research at The Young Foundation, responsible for designing and delivering participatory research and community peer research training with a range of partners including universities, the NHS, charities and local government. Research topics included youth violence, health equity, eco-anxiety, social infrastructure, access to healthly food and employment practices.

Prior to working at The Young Foundation, Jenny worked on a series of community engaged research projects at the University of Bristol including:

Connecting Through Culture: Co-produced research ethnographically into the cultural participation and wellbeing of older people who were disabled, socioeconomically and racially minoritized.

Lessons from Lockdown: Co-researched older peoples’ experiences of lockdown with a community action group to develop new guidelines for community engagement activity.

Researcher Wellbeing project: Worked with researchers, an occupational health professional and a counsellor to develop and evaluate measures to support researchers working on sensitive and challenging research topics.

SPAN A hands-on History Project: Participatory historical research project which researched the history of a single parent community organisation, involved collaborating with historians, community development workers, evaluator, community researchers and artists. 

Urban ID Project: Co-created a framework for diagnosing complex problems within key urban challenges and carried out a meta study interviewing partners regarding collaborative cross sectoral working.

Alonely: Collaborated with a community research collective of older people over a series of projects to research loneliness, develop interventions and share findings through creative writing and monologues.

Jenny has also worked for the University of the West of England with community evaluators on the Bristol Ageing Better research and evaluation: Age UK Bristol | Bristol Ageing Better and as an independent researcher with theatre companies and writers integrating research into devised and scripted productions.