You might notice something on the tables that doesn’t belong if you walk into some of the sociology seminars that are currently taking place at American universities. These seminars are typically held in small spaces with mismatched chairs and fluorescent lighting. Not precisely. Little laminated cards, carefully stacked in rows, each with a dense cluster of concepts on one side and the name and thumbnail portrait of a theorist on the other. Students treat them with the same reverence that is reserved for things that are both serious and enjoyable at the same time, just as children used to handle baseball cards.
It would be easy to write this off as novel. An academic disguise for a gimmick. However, the teachers who use theory trading cards in their sociology classes would argue against that and have something worthwhile to say.
At American universities, the decolonization of sociology curricula has been a protracted, contentious, and frequently frustrating process. In the late nineteenth century, when about 95% of the world was under colonial rule, the discipline was formalized. The presumptions of that world were absorbed and replicated by the founding fathers, Durkheim, Weber, and Spencer. Colonized peoples were portrayed as being at the back of civilization. The Protestant ethic and other internal cultural virtues were used to explain Western industrialization without taking into consideration the billions of dollars in capital that were extracted from the Caribbean and India. These are not old complaints. According to academics like Ali Meghji, the same Eurocentric reasoning is subtly present in modern theoretical frameworks, including those that are taught as the norm in graduate and introductory sociology courses.
This is where the cards come into play in a way that is more difficult to ignore than it first appears. A trading card’s physical design enforces its own set of rules. It compels the person who created it to make decisions—bold, obvious decisions—about which theorists merit a spot in the deck. A set that places Patricia Hill Collins next to Émile Durkheim or Frantz Fanon next to Max Weber isn’t just intriguing from an educational standpoint. The argument is structural. When students hold the deck, trade it, and discuss which card is the most theoretically potent, they are implicitly negotiating a question that the discipline has found difficult to formally address: whose knowledge counts. The deck becomes a kind of tangible syllabus.
A certain type of resistance seems to be lessened by the format. When the same concepts are presented in a tactile, gamified form, students who find dense theoretical reading alienating—of which there are many, across all demographics—interact differently. The Trading Card Effect, which suggests that people retain information more consistently when they are physically handling and organizing it, has been documented by educational researchers. It’s still up for debate whether that’s sufficient to warrant putting Gramsci in a card sleeve. There are scholars who object to the entire endeavor, and for good reason. Distortion is a risk of compression. The full complexity of Fanon’s ideas and the epistemic significance of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory cannot be captured on a trading card.
However, it’s important to consider what the alternative has accomplished. For a century, sociology education has been dominated by the lecture format, in which a single speaker addresses rows of disinterested students. As a result, graduates frequently complete their degrees without ever coming into contact with a non-Western theorist in a required course. According to recent theories, decolonizing the curriculum is essentially an additive endeavor. It engages Weber in dialogue with intellectuals whose work was influenced by the colonial systems he mostly disregarded, rather than erasing him. At the very least, a trading card deck that physically accomplishes the same task, card by card and trade by trade, is attempting to accomplish something that the conventional syllabus has not been able to.
It’s difficult to ignore how much the discussion about decolonizing sociology has remained stuck at the reading list level: expand the library collection, add more diverse texts, and update the bibliography. This superficial approach essentially ignores the deeper structures of whiteness and Eurocentrism, as critics from De Montfort to Princeton have noted. Academic institutional racism cannot be resolved by theory trading cards. That is a very different and difficult problem. However, as a classroom intervention, they accomplish something that updated bibliographies usually do not: they make the canonical hierarchy question visible and interactive, in real time, among students who are working through it collectively.
It’s genuinely unclear if this will remain a curiosity or become an integral part of American sociology education. Academic institutions exercise caution, and there are valid concerns regarding rigor that call for careful consideration. The decks are still on the tables. Pupils are grabbing for them. Furthermore, in the typical curriculum, the theorists who are being debated—Fanon, Hooks, Anzaldúa, and Bourdieu—do not typically prevail in those debates. That in and of itself seems worthwhile.
