Hello, I’m Jason Wragg — part academic, part traveller, and occasionally mistaken for someone who owns far more maps than is strictly necessary.

I’m currently Course Lead for Leadership Through Outdoor Adventure at the University of Central Lancashire — a one-of-a-kind, three-year full-time degree delivered through immersive residential experiences. Our flexible, hands-on approach means students don’t just learn about leadership in the outdoors — they live it.

With over 20 years of teaching experience in both further and higher education, my career has taken me from lecture halls to the Arctic Circle, Iceland, Botswana, Greece, and plenty of muddy tracks in between. My fieldwork and expedition management have spanned youth development programmes (including with at-risk young people) and educational expeditions for FE and HE students.

I hold a Master’s in Adventure Education, where my research explored how young people made sense of their expedition experiences in Iceland, particularly how narrative became a powerful tool for meaning-making. My PhD, Myths, Maps, and Motorcycles: An Autoethnographic Exploration of the Pilgrim Traveller, was a phenomenological study that embraced creative methods — including using comics as both a form of data analysis and dissemination.

These days, I supervise a range of research projects and continue my own research into phenomenological studies of overland travel, especially motorcycle journeys, and the narrative structures we use to make sense of them. I’m passionate about creative methodologies, storytelling, and collaborative research, with a particular interest in autoethnography and the role of journeying in education.

My work has been featured in publications such as Meaningful Journeys (Routledge) and the Routledge Handbook of Mobile Technology, Social Media and the Outdoors, with my first solo-authored book currently in progress.

Whether I’m riding a motorcycle across remote landscapes, leading a group through an Arctic expedition, or helping students shape their own research journeys, my work is driven by one thing: the stories we tell about the roads we take — and the ones we don’t.