Christy grew up in the United States and moved to the UK in 1999 to complete her undergraduate degree. She worked as a performer, journalist and teacher before returning to university. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2014. Following this, she worked at the Open University as a research assistant and for a London grassroots charity as a researcher. In 2015 she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge where she worked from 2016-2019. Her research monograph, Factories for Learning, was published in 2017 by Manchester University Press. It received the Society for Educational Studies Book Prize 2018 and is currently being translated into Japanese. She has also been a visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the University of Copenhagen. Christy is now IPODI Fellow, Sociology Department, Technische Universität-Berlin, on the project New Borders.