[1] Currently, she works as a "Distinguished Professor" in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, developing a Center for Social Inequalities in the North West of England.
[2] She has been the head of two of the UK's leading Sociology Departments, at the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, as well as co-director of Lancaster's Women's Studies.
Skeggs was born in Middlesbrough, a post-industrial town on the south bank of the River Tees in North Yorkshire.
[3] In September 2017, she became the Academic Director of the Atlantic Fellows programme at the London School of Economics and moved to take up a "Distinguished Professor" post at Lancaster University in May 2019.
The resulting book Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (edited with Sara Ahmed, Celia Lury, Jane Kilby and Maureen McNeil) includes chapters by Lauren Berlant, Gayatri Spivak, Donna Haraway, Elspeth Probyn and Vikki Bell.
A large-scale government funded ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) research project with Professor Leslie Moran, Paul Tyrer and Karen Corteen examined the sustainability and experience of gay space, resulting in the book Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety.
It also brings together innovative multi-methods, including a census space survey and citizen's inquiries, alongside traditional interviews and focus groups.
This method showed how class, gender and race relations are made in the research encounter when women authorize their own speech through recourse to cultural resources such as 'taste' and maternal authority (this is developed in their article on method in the 2008 European Journal of Cultural Studies and the ESRC research report).
[13] For instance, Facebook makes considerable economic gain from commodifying friendship through the algorithmic conversion of "likes" into advertising sales.
Using software designed by Dr Simon Yuill, this research installed a plug in on volunteers' browsers to collect all data over six months.
Research papers include: The methodology of a multi-model project examining how Facebook infrastructures social relations.
[15] In this project software is used alongside quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the digital production of new forms of inequality.
She edited a special issue on "Sociologies of Class: Elites (GBCS) and Critiques" (2015),[19] with an introduction on "Stratification or exploitation, domination, dispossession and devaluation?"
[21] At the International Sociological Association conference in 2015 she responded to Michael Burawoy in a debate about Gramsci and Bourdieu, "Roots of domination".
[24] Julie Burchill interviewed Skeggs for the Sky TV programmes Chavs (2005) and Girl Power (2007) (see YouTube).
She has also appeared in contributions to popular debates, such as the 1998 Channel 4 TV programme on 'Things to Come', exploring (with a comic twist) the future role of women.
[25] The BBC's Thinking Allowed radio programme covered her work in 2003,[26] 2008[27] and where she has also discussed 'class and Christmas', 'cruel optimism', 'moral economies' and 'everyday life' (with Les Back in 2016.
Beverley Skeggs gave a keynote lecture at the Pits and Perverts Revisited event @ Law Department, Birkbeck.