Dr Jenna Condie is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at Western Sydney University and a member of the Young and Resilient Research Centre. She is an engaged researcher, educator, and activist focused on building caring communities through collective action. Jenna’s disciplinary background spans social psychology, media studies, and urban geography, and she has contributed to a range of large-scale interdisciplinary projects. Her work focuses on community organising, climate activism, childcare justice, and critical education, using community-based research to support social change. Jenna’s teaching and research are grounded in advocacy and social movements, reflecting her commitment to justice and a more liveable future.

Jenna leads grassroots community organising for bold climate action, working with local groups in the Blue Mountains and western Sydney. She collaborates with organisations to support practical, accessible climate initiatives. At Western Sydney University, she co-leads the  Festival of Action, an events-based program that encourages student-staff activism and helps make climate action more visible on campus. This work contributes to Western Sydney University’s Impact Rankings for sustainability. Her current research explores clothes swapping as an accessible way into climate action within university and parent communities.

A key part of Jenna’s community organising work is her research and practice around how social media and digital tools support collective action. She uses her expertise in digital engagement to support communities to connect, organise, and campaign effectively. This approach informs projects like Seeing Yourself in Australian Digital Cultural Heritage (Australian Research Council) and Turtles in Schools (Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife), part of the national 1 Million Turtles conservation citizen science efforts. By focusing on accessible and strategic digital communication, Jenna works with communities to (re)claim narrative space, share knowledge, and drive social change through place-based initiatives. 

Since becoming a parent, Jenna has worked to address childcare stress through community-based solutions. In 2022, she co-founded Bub Hub Blue Mountains Inc., a grassroots non-profit that offers co-working with onsite childcare to support local families. She is also advocating for occasional creche care on campus to support student parents to balance study and caregiving. In 2023, she co-authored The Future of Work and Childcare in the western Sydney Region, a report that proposed a place-based childcare stress index. She now co-leads a JMI-funded project (2024–2026) to develop this index for Western Sydney. 

Jenna co-leads the Critical Pedagogies Research Group, an interdisciplinary community of educators committed to critical, creative, and justice-oriented approaches to teaching and learning. The group produces applied and theoretical scholarship grounded in anti-colonial and intersectional feminist frameworks, and supports robust educational research as a foundation for transformative pedagogical practice. It also mentors early career researchers and casual academics, particularly those with high teaching loads, in developing their scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Prior to this, Jenna was a 21C Curriculum Champion, leading the Future Thinkers Challenge, a university-wide initiative to develop transdisciplinary curriculum, including the Equitable Technologies and Climate Justice Challenge Minors. In 2021, she was awarded Teacher of the Year for this work.

Before joining Western Sydney University, Jenna worked at the University of Salford in Manchester, UK, where she completed a PhD in Critical Environmental Psychology. Her doctoral research, Living Alongside Railways: A Discursive Psychological Analysis of Adapting to Disruption and Identities of Place, was based in the Acoustics Research Centre and formed part of a DEFRA-funded project on human responses to vibration in residential environments. Earlier, she worked at the Sustainable Housing and Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU), focusing on the housing needs of marginalised groups, including Gypsies and Travellers, Eastern European migrant workers, and older people.