Before her Tuesday night class, Carmen, a sociology instructor at a Rio Grande Valley community college, laid out forty laminated cards on a folding table. Each card featured a face, such as Durkheim, Goffman, or Bell Hooks, along with a few facts on the reverse. Before entering that room, the majority of her students worked full shifts. The assigned textbook had not been purchased by any of them. Some had never owned one before. However, they took the cards, flipped them over, and began conversing.
All across the nation, underfunded universities and community learning centers are silently reenacting that scene or something similar. Originally a simple assignment from Lumen Learning’s open-access sociology curriculum, theory trading cards have spread far beyond the classroom. They have evolved into something unfamiliar and possibly more beneficial: an inexpensive gateway to concepts that academic publishing has long viewed as goods rather than knowledge.
The initial task was fairly simple. Students would choose a sociologist, compile five intriguing facts, locate an open-source image, and create a baseball card-like object. It was intended to feel friendly. It was intended to give a human face to theorists who, in the majority of textbook formats, are merely disembodied citations piled on top of lengthy paragraphs. It makes some sense. You are more likely to recall McLuhan’s statement that “the medium was the message” if you are aware that he had that specific amused expression in every picture. Perhaps.
When the cards completely deviate from the rubric, that’s when things start to get really interesting. They have been printed on cardstock and utilized in after-school programs by teachers in rural Appalachian school districts. Because they had access to open-source images and Wikipedia citations, a youth organization in South Chicago developed a comprehensive sociology curriculum based on card sets they created themselves. This was not assigned. No grant proposal was made for it initially.
The effectiveness of it is almost unsettling. For years, the sociology textbook industry has defended prices that routinely surpass $180 per edition. New editions are released just often enough to destroy the resale market, and they are so similar to the previous edition that you wonder what exactly changed. The textbook was never useful for communities where that amount is equivalent to two weeks’ worth of groceries. It was a wall. None of that matters to the card, which is printed on something you can get at the dollar store.
This could be oversold. A sociology education is not a trading card. It is not the same as comprehending anomie to know that Émile Durkheim taught France’s first official sociology course in 1895 and was reportedly hard to get along with. Academic critics are correct to note that superficial familiarity can—and occasionally does—pass for comprehension. The worry is not unfounded.
However, it’s not insignificant to observe what happens when someone who never thought of themselves as someone who “does sociology” picks up a card and sincerely debates with their neighbor about whether media influences or reflects behavior. In actuality, that’s the start of something. The theory was not replaced by the card. $200 had been silently keeping a door closed, but it opened it.
