Kayleigh joined CYCJ in July 2024 as a Research Associate on the Nuffield-funded project ‘Challenge Justice Inequalities: Co-producing change with children in conflict with the law’. The project will run from 2024-2026 and aims to explore how intersecting inequalities affect children’s experiences of the justice system. The project involves working closely with a Young Advisory Group who are directly involved in the research, analysis and production of outputs.

Kayleigh completed her PhD at the University of Bath titled ‘The Imaginary Queer Prison: The Possibilities and Limitations of Queering the Prison’. This was an interdisciplinary thesis that explored conceptualisations of queer spaces, uses and meanings of ‘queer’, LGBTQ+ pains of imprisonment and the use of speculative fiction to (re)imagine responses to the social and economic inequalities faced by LGBTQ+ communities.

Her research interests broadly include justice inequalities, gender and sexuality, queer politics, and creative methodologies.