Author: Melissa Bridwell

Like many odd academic endeavors, it began with a bored person at a desk. Inspired by football stickers and Pokémon decks, David Gauntlett, a media studies professor at the time who also runs theory.org.uk, started making little illustrated cards of cultural theorists. The format itself was a joke. At first, it seemed like a lighthearted joke on the gravity of theory to put Foucault on a card next to a power rating. Lecturers ordering sets in bulk was not anticipated by anyone. However, that’s exactly what transpired—gradually, then suddenly. The deck had subtly left the realm of humor by the…

Of all places, it took place in a Bristol seminar room. A postgraduate wearing a wool jumper actually gasped when someone slid a tiny laminated rectangle across the table. Printed on the same card, Hall, Foucault, and Bourdieu appeared mildly suspicious of one another, as though the designer had subtly foreseen decades of footnoted disagreement. There’s a feeling that no one anticipated theory cards would become popular, but here we are. Before you sit with the concept for a minute, it seems ridiculous. These pocket-sized portraits of dead thinkers have become a favorite among academics who spend years pretending to…

I initially thought it was a joke when I saw a sociology trading card pinned to a lecture hall wall. It was in a humanities building corridor, the kind of area where signs about reading groups gradually turn yellow under fluorescent lights. The card featured five facts organized in a tidy little column, along with the somewhat awkward student illustration of Erving Goffman’s face. He had a small mortarboard drawn on his head by someone. It was amusing. In some way, it was also working. Now, that little visual joke has spread farther than anyone anticipated. The creators of theorycards.org.uk,…

Theory trading cards have returned to the conversation somewhere between a joke and a genuine love letter. They are sometimes tucked into the back of a syllabus like a wink, passed around at conference book fairs, and photographed on disorganized graduate student desks. A glossy foil Foucault. Judith Butler in holography. It seems ridiculous at first, but after a minute of sitting with it, it begins to seem almost inevitable. The initial run, which originated on theory.org.uk and was expanded by Critical-Theory.com in 2013, was always partially a joke. Commodify all of them. The hard work was done by the…

Observing a highly scholarly project almost unintentionally resurface has a subtle humorous quality. The British media scholar David Gauntlett, who created theory.org.uk when the internet was still a strange new place, recently removed the majority of the content he had maintained online for about 20 years. He reasoned that it was no longer necessary. He was mistaken, and the evidence showed up in a matter of hours. Someone who was unable to locate the Theory Trading Cards sent the first message. Then more. In less than 30 minutes, Gauntlett reposted PDFs of cards he had created almost 20 years prior,…

I first noticed the overlap when a graduate student had two stacks of cards on the table in a coffee shop close to a university library. One stack contained plastic-sleeved Pokémon. The other featured heavy-ink drawings of Karl Marx, Durkheim, and Du Bois, each with a row of statistics that ran down the side like an old baseball card. There was little ceremony as she moved between them. It was difficult to ignore. That little scene conveys a greater message about the subtle intersection of research and collecting. Nearly thirty years after their initial release, Pokémon cards are once again…

The football card industry is currently experiencing a certain level of unease, which is evident in the message boards, Whatnot streams, and even the way store owners shrug when you inquire about Leaf products. Depending on your point of view within the hobby, the NFLPA’s May 1 lawsuit against Leaf Trading Cards is either long overdue or extremely aggressive. Honestly, probably both. The Texas-based card manufacturer is accused in the complaint, which was submitted to a federal court in Virginia, of using over six active NFL players in a 12-month period without obtaining a group licensing agreement. Everything revolves around…

The smell is the first thing you notice when you enter the house of someone who has 100,000 trading cards. Not too bad, in fact. Just specific. Something near library shelves on a muggy afternoon, the subtle sweetness of old cardboard. Typically, the cards are not visible. They reside in cardboard boxes that are stacked along a wall and are marked in marker with a date, a player’s last name, or nothing at all. People are surprised by that detail. More recent collectors envision spotlights and glass cases. The actual situation is more akin to a silent office storage room.…

It was not David Gauntlett’s intention to create anything for prisons. The cards he made, which were little printed prompts on identity, belonging, and self-expression, were intended for use in undergraduate seminars and sixth-form classrooms—the kinds of settings where Stuart Hall might be mentioned alongside Beyoncé. However, at some point, the cards made their way. They found themselves enrolled in educational programs inside British prisons in a covert and nearly undetectable manner. It’s the kind of diversion that scholars seldom anticipate. Gauntlett, a sociologist best known in the UK for his identity theory and his love of Lego as a…

When I first saw one of these zines, it was partially concealed behind a pile of lanyards on a folding table at a small media studies conference in Leeds. The cover of Foucault’s card had a moustache drawn on it. The photocopies were a bit too dark, the pages were crooked, and the margins were filled with handwritten notes that had been crossed out. To be honest, it appeared to have been prepared at two in the morning on a kitchen table. However, the five-page lead essay, which discussed Tracey Emin’s card and the politics of confessional art, was more…