Jessica Lumanisha (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Department: Anthropology
Nationality: British
Country: United Kingdom
Interests (keywords): Jessica Lumanisha is a London-based Congolese-Polish anthropologist. She holds an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from the LSE and is currently completing a CHASE/AHRC-funded PhD in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her thesis, Dear Friends: Tantalisation, Blackness, and the Afterlives of Polish Socialist Modernity, was submitted in June 2025 and explores racial governance, temporality, and affect through an intimate multimodal ethnography of Blackness in (post)socialist Poland.
Jessica’s research centres on intersectional approaches to racial inequality, migration, and nationalism, with a particular focus on the lives of people of African descent in Poland. Drawing on life histories, archival research, and experimental ethnographic methods, her work examines how Black presence has been courted, instrumentalised, and erased within shifting political regimes. She engages decolonial methodologies and is especially interested in the entanglements of postcolonialism and post-socialism in Central and Eastern Europe.
A Black Europe Summer School alumna, Jessica is also an anti-racist educator and co-author of the first Polish-language anti-racist dictionary. Her practice spans public scholarship, activist pedagogy, and collaborative knowledge production.
Highest Degree: MSc Inequalties and Social Science
Degree Awarding Institution: The London School of Economics and Political Science
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