A Feel for Thinking: Lessons for a Political Education

With universities tightening their grip on dissent, speech, and creativity, the opportunities for marginalized students to access social justice curriculum and mentorship are shrinking. A Feel for Thinking is a salve in these bleak conditions: a study guide for readers who want to ground themselves in radical ideas. In conversational style, Sharon Luk offers an orientation to long-standing ideas rooted in social justice traditions, helping readers unpack concepts in contemporary abolitionist thought.

Drawing on the conceptual work of major thinkers like Cedric Robinson on racial capitalism, Robyn Maynard and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on abolition, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on Indigenous traditions of world-making, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney on solidarity, Luk suffuses A Feel for Thinking with personal stories of her own wayfinding through these complex ideas. Refuting the cynical expression, “those who can’t do, teach,” Luk proves that, on the contrary, those who teach, do. Luk demonstrates her skill in critical pedagogy, encouraging and supporting readers to cultivate their intellectual practice to anchor themselves in their uniqueness and specificities in struggle with others.

Sharon Luk was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. Before an academic career, she worked mainly in independent media and youth and community development. She is an associate professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Geographies of Racialization in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. She also held positions at the University of Oregon, Stanford University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity (University of California Press, 2018) won awards from the American Studies Association and Modern Language Association. She has written numerous articles about racial capitalism, state violence, women of colour feminisms, and abolitionist practice. She is working on a book called Sea of Fire: An Abolitionist Inquiry into the Making of Nonviolence, which recontextualizes dominant notions of nonviolence in relation to evolving meanings and movements of the global South.