It was not David Gauntlett’s intention to create anything for prisons. The cards he made, which were little printed prompts on identity, belonging, and self-expression, were intended for use in undergraduate seminars and sixth-form classrooms—the kinds of settings where Stuart Hall might be mentioned alongside Beyoncé. However, at some point, the cards made their way. They found themselves enrolled in educational programs inside British prisons in a covert and nearly undetectable manner.
It’s the kind of diversion that scholars seldom anticipate. Gauntlett, a sociologist best known in the UK for his identity theory and his love of Lego as a research tool, has spent years arguing that people use creative acts—such as building, drawing, and talking around objects rather than at them—to make sense of who they are. Prisons, where identity is reduced to a number on a wristband and conversations are frequently guarded, seem to have been waiting for just that kind of tool without realizing it.
| Keys | Values |
|---|---|
| Name | David Gauntlett |
| Profession | Sociologist, Media Theorist, Author |
| Known For | Identity theory, creative methods research, Lego-based research |
| Current Role | Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University |
| Notable Works | Making is Connecting, Creative Explorations, Media, Gender and Identity |
| Academic Background | PhD in Sociology, University of Leeds |
| Field of Influence | Media studies, creativity research, A-Level curriculum |
| Research Tools | Identity cards, visual exercises, creative methods |
| Origin of Cards | Designed for classroom identity discussions |
| New Use Case | UK prison education and rehabilitation programs |
| Nationality | British |
The cards themselves are surprisingly straightforward. Half-questions, fragments, and prompts. For example, what aspects of you are missed by others? Or what would you like to be remembered for? They provoke discussion about audience theory and self-presentation in an A-Level media studies classroom. They do something completely different in a prison education room. Teachers claim that because the cards are indirect, they are effective. No one is required to directly respond to the question. No one needs to look someone in the eye.
It’s more important than it seems. Direct confession is rarely accepted within the system. There is pressure to perform, to tell your story succinctly, and to avoid showing too much. In order to survive socially, prisoners frequently repress emotional disclosure, according to a 2019 Queen’s University Belfast study on cell-sharing and wellbeing. Strangely, cards allow people to communicate without actually speaking. They serve as a doorway, a deflection, and a prop all at once.
For his part, Gauntlett appears genuinely taken aback by the development. He has expressed his hope that his work will be seen outside of academia in remarks to media educators over the years, but he has been cautious not to make such a claim. The cards were not intended for use in trauma-informed settings. They did not participate in workshops with forensic psychologists. To be honest, they were designed for teenagers who were considering Instagram.
However, there is a fitting aspect to the migration. Gauntlett’s broader argument, the one running through Making is Connecting and the rest of his writing, is that creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s how people repair themselves, how they rebuild a sense of who they are when the world has flattened them. Few populations need that more than people serving sentences, many of whom arrived already flattened long before the gate closed behind them.
Whether the cards actually rehabilitate anyone is harder to say. The evidence in UK prison education is patchy, funding is fragile, and the third sector charities that often deliver these programmes, groups like Clinks and the Prisoners’ Education Trust, are stretched thin. Parliament discussed prison education again in November last year, with the usual mix of urgency and underwhelming follow-through. It’s still unclear whether modest tools like Gauntlett’s will be folded into anything formal, or whether they’ll keep circulating the way they have, hand to hand, classroom to classroom, almost folkloric.
It’s difficult to ignore the irony. A media theorist’s classroom prop has found its most surprising readership behind locked doors. Gauntlett didn’t write it that way. Someone else did.
