There is a certain type of object that is somewhere between serious and funny. Something that makes you not sure whether to show it off or hide it in a drawer before your coworkers get there. That kind of thing is theory trading cards, which are small, illustrated cards with names like Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, and Michel Foucault on them. They’ve also found their most enthusiastic fans in graduate seminar rooms in the United States, not in the lecture halls of British universities where they were first thought of.
The cards were first made by David Gauntlett for his website theory.org.uk, which was both a serious and a funny project. The idea behind it was simple: take complicated and sometimes scary figures from cultural and media theory, make them into cards with a short description, and see what happens. The very first set had twelve cards. AltaMira Press published a version with thirty-three cards, twenty-one of which were new cards chosen from a carefully chosen group of theorists who have changed the way we think about art, media, culture, and identity.
It’s hard not to notice how well the format fits graduate school in the United States. Because they have to, graduate students have to learn a huge amount of theory very quickly, often while teaching undergrads, grading papers, and living on stipends that don’t quite cover rent. It’s not really a toy when you have a card that condenses Judith Butler’s whole point about gender performance into a single paragraph. It seems like the format works not because it replaces serious reading, but because it helps students get started before they move on to more difficult books.
As an example, Butler’s card shows the call for many extreme gender performances to challenge long-held beliefs. Yes, it is small. Certainly not complete. But for a first-year humanities student who is looking at a 400-page syllabus, that condensed form is useful. It’s still an open question, and a good one, whether that’s the best way to deal with ideas this complicated.
This is an interesting time for trading cards because they are having a big cultural moment right now. The market for collectibles as a whole has really grown. Every year, billions of dollars flow through it, and a lot of that money is driven by nostalgia. Dads who used to collect as kids are now getting their kids interested in it. Shopping and opening boxes has become its own form of entertainment thanks to social media. Theory cards are different from the rest of this because people don’t want them for their resale value or how rare they are. Instead, they want them for their usefulness and the dry academic humor that comes from seeing Foucault drawn in the same way as a Pokémon.
It turns out that graduate schools in the United States really want things like this. Campus bookstores that didn’t carry the cards before now do, along with course readers. Their face can be seen at orientation fairs. They are given out by some teachers. There’s a version of this that could easily become a gimmick, and it does that sometimes. Most of the time, though, the cards lead to useful conversations where students ask each other what a certain theorist really said, argue about whether the summary is fair, and point out what was left out.
It’s possible that the cards’ popularity in the U.S. says something specific about how American academia relates to British intellectual culture: with respect, but also with a desire to make it a little easier to understand, more portable, and better suited to a fifty-minute seminar that covers three theorists. The cards were made in Britain just for fun. In America, they were used to study, to start conversations, and for some students, they became too much of a good thing. We didn’t expect that kind of transatlantic exchange to happen.
