Katie Beswick is Senior Lecturer in Arts Management and Programme Director for BA Arts Management at Goldsmiths, University of London. She previously taught on drama, theatre and performance programmes at a number of UK Universities, including UAL, University of Exeter, Queen Mary University of London and the University of Leeds.

Her research interests center around issues of social class in the arts. She is especially concerned with understanding how wider social and cultural policy and legislation, which contribute to inequity, are intertwined with arts practices. For example, much of her work to date has been concerned with issues of social housing – examining how housing policy and governance are influenced by ideas that flow through performance and other artworks. Her 2019 monograph, Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage” (Methuen), explored the ways council estates appear in theatre, performance, art, film, and television. With Conrad Muray, she is the author of Making Hip Hop Theatre: Beatbox and Elements (Methuen 2022), a practical guide to using hip hop in theatre, which understands hip hop as always embedded in class politics. She has also written on how the criminalization of a form of dance called “litefeet” in New York City is bound up with wider social and cultural notions of race and class in hip hop forms. Her latest book, Slags on Stage, is due for publication with Routledge in 2024. This project traces the etymology of the word “slag” and its uses to denote a damaged female sexual reputation in twentieth and twenty-first-century culture. It explores how women artists (Tracey Emin, Michaela Coel and Cash Carraway) have used the idea of “slaggyness” in their work, and includes a collection of poems that play with notions of what it feels like to be called “slag”.

Katie Beswick is Assistant Editor for the Journal of Class and Culture, and is a frequent contributor to the music and culture magazine Loud and Quiet.