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Across his research, writing and teaching, Luke explores the relationship between the government of mobility and processes of racialisation. His first book, Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of deportation to Jamaica, was published in September 2020 with Manchester University Press. This ethnographic monograph tells the life stories of four men who grew up in the UK, were banished to Jamaica following criminal conviction, and now struggle to survive and rebuild in the Caribbean. It won the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best first and sole-authored book within the discipline of Sociology.
Luke’s current research is based in Jamaica, where he is exploring the implementation of the government’s digital national identification scheme (NIDs), as well as policies surrounding ‘citizen security’. In this emergent body of work, Luke questions how the extension of market relations (in part through national identification and citizen security), and attempts to extend state authority, necessarily imply the disciplining of unruly mobilities - which speaks to larger questions about political economy, crime and policing, citizenship and freedom. Relatedly, Luke is interested in describing and analysing Jamaica through the lens of differential (im)mobilities, the varied ways in which differently valued people and things move and are made to move.
Luke was one of the co-authors of the book Empire’s End Game: Racism and the British State, published with Pluto Press in February 2021, and Against Borders: The case for abolition, co-written with Gracie Mae Bradley, and published in August 2022 with Verso Books.
Luke has written for the Guardian, LRB, Verso blogs, Open Democracy, The New Humanist, and Ceasefire Magazine. He has also produced a podcast with deported people in Jamaica, Deportation Discs, a riff on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, in which deported people tell their stories via their life's soundtrack. Luke previously sat on the editorial board for the Sociological Review.
He is Programme Director for the MA in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies.
