The academic community largely shrugged when David Gauntlett introduced a series of sociology trading cards via his website Theory.org in the year 2000. Some people thought it was adorable. It was referred to as a gimmick by some. Nobody anticipated that Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Anthony Giddens would wind up in students’ jacket pockets and be passed around seminar rooms like rare foil Pokémon cards. But here’s the thing: that’s essentially what took place.
Each of the twelve cards in the original set, which was released once a month, featured a social or cultural theorist along with their main points and a set of statistics that players could use to play a game of trumps. For example, Foucault’s card attributed to him the unique ability of “happily rejecting old models and creating new ones.” The idea that biological sex is just as much a social construct as gender was addressed in Judith Butler’s entry. These weren’t simplistic summaries. They were thoughtful, condensed, and—this is important—made to be held in your hand and debated.
Gauntlett might not have fully anticipated what he had initiated. Before scholars, students, and enthusiasts started creating unofficial additions to the original twelve cards—Karl Marx, Carl Jung, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Said, Germaine Greer, and Walter Benjamin—the cards were hardly published. A sense of absence propelled the deck’s natural growth. People desired representation for their theorists. It is difficult to create that level of engagement.
“Creative knowledge you can put in your pocket² is the tagline on the cards, which sounds a little tongue-in-cheek but is actually more accurate than most course descriptions. People’s interactions with information are altered by the physical format in some way. Scrolling a PDF is not the same as holding a card. You turn it over. You contrast it with another card. You debate whether Duchamp’s capacity to “confuse the hell out of everyone” is superior to Foucault’s power deconstruction. Almost by coincidence, that argument is a sociology seminar.
This is precisely what research on educational card games has been gradually demonstrating. Card-based game formats enhance student attention, promote social interaction, and facilitate collaborative learning in ways that traditional formats frequently find difficult to match, according to studies reviewed over the past ten years. Positive learning outcomes continued to emerge in various age groups and disciplines. It’s still unclear if the act of making abstract material tactile and competitive—rather than the card format itself—deserves the credit. Most likely both.
Here, the larger context is important. For years, initiatives like the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Games, Learning and Society program have argued that learning through interactive media and structured play is not a lesser form of education. Researchers, designers, and educators who sincerely believe that there is less of a divide between serious learning and entertainment than most institutions would like to acknowledge are drawn to their annual conference. Sociology trading cards fall somewhere in the middle, neither quite a game nor quite a study aid.
As this develops, it seems as though academia is reluctantly and slowly coming around to what the students discovered more quickly. The names of the three universities where sociology trading cards are said to have outsold course textbooks have not been disclosed. However, the data point itself makes a statement. Textbooks are costly, unchanging, and frequently written from a distance from the student who is reading them. A wallet-sized card featuring Simone de Beauvoir’s face and a list of bullet points regarding the social construction of femininity is nearly inexpensive. Students are met where they are in one format. The other doesn’t.
All of this does not imply that the textbook is complete or that a Michel Foucault card provides a thorough understanding of critical theory. It doesn’t. However, it could be what initially piques a student’s interest enough to open the textbook, and that’s not insignificant. That may actually be the most difficult aspect of the work.
