One type of academic project starts out as a joke and gradually develops into something more resilient than the textbooks that are placed next to it. Among them are the Theory.org.uk Trading Cards. Around 2000, David Gauntlett, a younger media studies scholar with an excessive amount of curiosity and a keen sense of the ridiculousness of cultural theory, began creating these cards. It was a modest idea. The great thinkers of cultural and media theory, such as Foucault, Bell Hooks, Said, Deleuze, and Guattari, can be reduced to trading cards in the same way that children were trading Pokémon on playgrounds at the time.
It wasn’t supposed to work. Twenty-six years later, however, the project has outlasted a plethora of slick university portals, earnest theory blogs, and serious academic websites that came and went. That’s telling in some way. Perhaps humor is more ageless than gravitas.
| Information | Details |
|---|---|
| Project Name | Theory.org.uk Trading Cards |
| Creator | David Gauntlett |
| Year Launched | 2000–2001 |
| Original Card Count | 12 official online cards |
| Expanded Print Edition | 21 cards (AltaMira Press) |
| Subject Matter | Cultural, media, gender and identity theory |
| Featured Theorists | Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Bell Hooks, Edward Said, and others |
| Creator’s Affiliation | Professor of Media and Communications, University of Westminster |
| Notable Press Coverage | New York Times feature, 2004; The Lancet, 2001 |
| Educational Use | Adopted by Bournemouth University and Seton Hill |
| Format Available | High-resolution PDFs for free download |
| Current Status | Still online; cult following among students and educators |
The cards themselves are basic items. A name, a brief biography, a stylized portrait, and what Gauntlett referred to as a “special skill”—a succinct, almost cheeky summary of each thinker’s accomplishments. Anyone who has ever waded through Discipline and Punish at two in the morning before a seminar will find Foucault’s card to be a wink. Bell Hooks receives quiet affection of her own. Even when Gauntlett is making jokes, it’s difficult to ignore how generous he is with these figures when reading them.
The project gained popularity in the same way that things on the internet did at the time. Gradually, through word-of-mouth on early blogs, an article in the New York Times in 2004, and eventually in classrooms. In 2001, they were mentioned in the Lancet, of all places. By 2013, breathless posts about the cards, half-jokes about Guy Debord, and the spectacle of “having” critical theory in your pocket were appearing on Critical-Theory.com. There’s a delectable irony there that Gauntlett obviously liked but never quite articulated.
I believe that the cards work because they take theory seriously enough to gently mock it. The majority of academic outreach seems rigid. It doesn’t. If you walk into a media studies seminar at Westminster or Bournemouth, lecturers will still use the cards as icebreakers, divide the students into groups, and ask them to defend Stuart Hall’s victory over Judith Butler in a hypothetical intellectual cage match. Pupils chuckle. The theorists were then actually read by them. The trick is that.
AltaMira Press then produced a printed version that increased the set to 21 cards and included more biographical and detailed information. Even a limited Amazon run was available. Fans created knockoff versions, which Gauntlett’s website humorously refers to as “unofficial.” Perhaps no other scholarly endeavor has ever served as an inspiration for bootlegs.
The website is still operational. The PDFs are still available for free. Just a few days ago, theorycards.org.uk, a new domain, appeared with a WordPress post placeholder. This could be a refresh or something more. Whether Gauntlett is planning a new edition or just organizing the archive is still unknown. In any case, there’s a sense that these tiny cards, which were created as a joke, have in some way evolved into a modest monument to a more lighthearted internet and a more lighthearted approach to education.
