Kayleigh began her academic career as a Research Assistant at Teesside University in 2008. From 2009 to 2017, she was based in the Department of Geography at Durham University, where she also completed her PhD in Human Geography. She joined the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow in 2017 and became Professor of Social Policy and Inequalities in 2026.

Kayleigh’s books include Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain (Policy Press, 2012), Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain (Policy Press, 2016) and Hunger Inc.: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank (Pluto Press, 2025). Her research has received several major awards, including the 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology and Social Policy and the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize in 2013 and 2017. It has been supported by the British Academy, Nuffield Foundation, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the Leverhulme Trust.

Kayleigh is a co-founder of the Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health and Social Justice (GSA), which brings together researchers, activists and civil society organisations working to challenge charitable responses to food insecurity and advance the right to food. Her work has informed parliamentary inquiries, policy consultations and public debate in the UK and internationally.

As an interdisciplinary social policy scholar and ethnographer, Kayleigh examines how poverty, inequality and social insecurity are experienced and governed. Her research centres lived experience and uses ethnographic, participatory, creative and collaborative methods.

Kayleigh was awarded the 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology and Social Policy to develop an international programme of research on the institutionalisation and corporatisation of charitable food provision. Through patchwork ethnographic fieldwork and learning exchanges across North America and Europe, the research examined the normalisation of emergency food aid, its relationship to changing welfare states, and efforts to build solidarity and rights-based alternatives.

Kayleigh was a Co-Investigator on the Nuffield Foundation-funded Covid Realities programme from 2020 to 2022. The participatory project explored how families living on a low income experienced the pandemic and changes to the social security system. She led work connecting 14 research projects involving more than 4,000 parents and carers, alongside activities supporting ethical and sensitive poverty research during the pandemic.

Her earlier research at Durham University examined recurrent poverty, welfare reform, health inequalities and territorial stigma in North East England. As part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Local Health Inequalities in an Age of Austerity project, she led ethnographic research in contrasting areas of Stockton-on-Tees, including an in-depth study of lived experiences of food bank use.