Something can go from being clever to being truly strange at one point, and doing it on purpose makes it even stranger. Somewhere in that area is a trading card that features David Gauntlett, his real face and credentials, rather than a fictional character he invented or a fictional character from one of his books. It is either the most ridiculous or the most honest product in higher education, depending on your desire for academic self-awareness.
Gauntlett held a similar senior role at the University of Westminster before becoming a Professor of Creative Practice at Toronto Metropolitan University. For the majority of his career, he has been researching creativity, making, and what it means for regular people to make things. He is the author of Making is Connecting, a book that, if you studied media studies in 2011, most likely ended up on a reading list you carried around in a hallway. In essence, the claim was that creating things, whether they be tangible, shared, or real-world objects, creates true social ties. Although it wasn’t a bold assertion, he made it with caution and it was accepted.
This context is important. Because, even if it’s made with a smile, a trading card featuring your face is more than just a piece of merchandise. It seems that Gauntlett has always had a mild interest in blurring the lines between the made and the studied, the tangible and the academic. The trading card fits into a pattern for someone who runs an independent music label, releases electronic music under the name Sculpture Projects, and conducts research using LEGO bricks as a creative thinking tool. It might have started out as a joke. It’s also possible that the idea was taken very seriously. It could be both.
The fact that a professor turned the item into a collectible is not the only thing that makes it truly meta. The reason for this is that Gauntlett’s entire body of work has focused on how individuals express themselves through artistic endeavors. He is one of ten media scholars listed in the UK’s national curriculum for A-Level Media Studies, meaning that every year, teenagers all over the country are expected to study his theories regarding identity and production. Therefore, the card with David Gauntlett on it is an act of self-representation by someone who has spent decades carefully considering just that. There, it’s difficult to ignore the loop closing.
Academic merchandise typically falls into one of two categories: the blatantly ostentatious or the sheepishly generic, such as mugs, tote bags, and the occasional tote bag with a slightly different shape. A building, a scholarship, a named chair. Neither is the trading card. Instead of being institutional, it has a certain cheekiness to it, a willingness to make the claim clear. This is an individual. These are the actions they have taken. You are able to grasp it with your hands.
It’s genuinely unclear if it belongs as a bookmark in a copy of Creativity or in a cabinet with rare Pokémon cards. However, there is something about it that seems more intriguing than the majority of what academia produces when it attempts to interact with the outside world. It doesn’t give lectures. It is not self-justifying. It simply exists, somewhat improbable, as a little rectangular object with a person on it. By now, this person has probably given that more thought than anyone who has ever appeared on a trading card.⁖※
