Luke de Noronha

Luke de Noronha is an Associate Professor in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, University College London (UCL). He serves as Programme Director for the MA in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies and explores the relationship between mobility governance and racialisation processes across his research, teaching, and public writing.

His research centers on deportation regimes, racial capitalism, and postcolonial state formations. His award-winning ethnographic monograph Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of deportation to Jamaica (2020) examines life stories of men deported from the UK to Jamaica. Current work investigates Jamaica's digital national identification scheme (NIDs) and 'citizen security' policies, analyzing how market extensions and state authority attempts discipline unruly mobilities within frameworks of political economy, policing, and freedom. He also studies Jamaica through differential (im)mobilities lenses, co-authored Empire’s End Game: Racism and the British State (2021), and Against Borders: The case for abolition (2022).

His 2020-2023 publications reveal consistent thematic trajectories: border abolition politics, racialized deportation machinery, citizenship hierarchies in multi-status societies, and Caribbean post-deportation experiences. Key analytical threads connect racism to immigration control, state violence to mobility management, and imperial legacies to contemporary British racism, with methodological emphasis on ethnographic life stories and critical political economy.

Scientific awards include:

• British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first sole-authored sociology book (2020)

As Programme Director for the MA in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies, de Noronha oversees curriculum development and student supervision. No specific grant funding details are publicly documented, though his research is sustained through institutional support and public intellectual engagements including Guardian, LRB, and Verso contributions.

He operates within UCL's Sarah Parker Remond Centre framework and has created the Deportation Discs podcast featuring deported Jamaicans' life stories through musical narratives, establishing an innovative public anthropology platform that complements his academic work.