You can walk into a graduate seminar on cultural theory at almost any mid-sized state university and see the same things: coffee cups, dog-eared notebooks, and someone heavily underlining a copy of a Foucault essay. But quietly, a little something a little different has been showing up on seminar tables at the same time: small cards with pictures on them. There are cards that, if you look closely, kind of look like Pokémon. These are trading cards for theories. They are actually being given by professors.
Most people don’t know that the idea began earlier than they do. The first set was made by David Gauntlett, a professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, in 2001. It was on theory.org.uk, a website that was made to help students find their way in the complicated and often impossible world of cultural theory. In 2004, the New York Times wrote about them. After that, fan-made versions that weren’t official started going around. Cards with quotes from Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Bell Hooks, and Deleuze and Guattari. You can print them all at home for free in high resolution. After twenty years, this simple idea still seems like the right thing to do at this very moment.
Even though it doesn’t make sense at first, the appeal is easy to see. There is a textbook problem in higher education that almost everyone in the field agrees on but not many have actually found a solution for. Course books usually cost $200 to $300, and sometimes even more. A big chunk of those costs go back to the publishers, and sometimes, quietly, to the professors who made the assignments. In academic circles, there is a constant argument about whether it is ethical for a professor to assign their own textbook, since students are already paying for their knowledge. Some professors have found creative ways to get around this problem, such as giving away draft manuscripts, donating royalties, or working with university bookstores to get prices lowered. Most people don’t bother. All of that doesn’t apply to the cards at all.
In a way, the trading card format does something that the 400-page book really can’t. It makes you squeeze. There are too many subtleties in Discipline and Punish to fit on a card about Foucault, but that’s the point. That way, students have something to hold on to before they start reading the real thing. A name, a face, and a main idea. A way in. People in graduate school who have used them say it was like meeting a theorist for the first time in a memorable way, instead of being thrown into their hardest chapter right away.
What’s interesting is that Gauntlett himself seems to know exactly what he made. In a way, his site is open and doesn’t make money; the cards are free to print because making money was never the point. It was easy to read. Getting cultural theory to feel less like a locked room and more like a place where students could go and explore. It doesn’t matter if he meant for that philosophy to set him apart from the textbook economy that is all around him.
Also, the cards that fans made after 2004 that aren’t official say something interesting. People who had never met Gauntlett started making their own cards for Bell Hooks and Edward Said on their own time and for free. This wasn’t just fandom. There was proof that the format was doing something real. People spread ideas because they wanted to, not because that’s what they had to do for a $280 course pack.
When you watch all of this, it’s hard not to notice that the students who get the most out of difficult theory are usually the ones who found an easy way to start, like a documentary, a podcast, or even a well-designed card on the seminar table. The cards don’t take the place of reading. It doesn’t do anything. But they may be the best proof that getting to complicated ideas doesn’t have to start with a pricey barrier.
Professors who give out trading cards for theory instead of adding another required text to an already long list are not skimping on work. They’re just being honest about how learning really begins: with interest, a familiar face, and something small enough to hold.
