Author: Melissa Bridwell

When you walk through the back rows of a freshman lecture hall in late September, the trading card is the first thing you notice. Half-laminated and occasionally coffee-stained, it is tucked into a binder. A neat column of “five fun facts” appears on one side, while a black-and-white photo of a sociologist—typically McLuhan, occasionally Goffman, and occasionally Stuart Hall if the professor is feeling ambitious—appears on the other. There will be a long pause if you ask the student who made it what the theorist actually argued. They will respond right away if you ask them what year the theorist…

The actual auction wasn’t particularly noteworthy. A roll-up door, a padlock that the facility manager had cut, and perhaps nine or ten bidders in a half-circle in the kind of late-morning light that makes everything appear a little more depressing than it actually is. Under $1,000, the bidding stopped. In the rear, there was inexpensive furniture and a Sega Genesis with one controller missing. No one appeared excited. The victor shrugged in the manner of those who have already mentally discounted the expense. The boxes were what he initially failed to notice. The labels on four plastic totes that were…

When I first saw a Theory Trading Card, it was in an open notebook of a graduate student on a coffee shop table. Karl Marx, with his eyes peering out as if he were about to argue with the espresso machine, was depicted in thick black ink with a slightly exaggerated beard. A row of statistics, similar to those on an old baseball card, was arranged beneath him. Influence: 99. Optimism: 12. Despite having a slightly ridiculous quality, it stayed with me longer than most lecture slides. The same issue has always plagued sociology students. The writing often reads as…

A specific type of trading card joke is common at conference hotel bars and graduate seminars, and it usually ends the same way. Everyone nods when someone brings up Foucault, another brings up Gramsci, and then a somewhat weary voice from the back of the room says, “Yeah, but you’ve got to have the Hall.” No one truly explains why. The Jamaican-British scholar has emerged as something of a cultural studies patron saint, whose face would be the rare holographic pull if such a deck were to truly exist. For a man who once intended to write his doctoral thesis…

One type of academic project starts out as a joke and gradually develops into something more resilient than the textbooks that are placed next to it. Among them are the Theory.org.uk Trading Cards. Around 2000, David Gauntlett, a younger media studies scholar with an excessive amount of curiosity and a keen sense of the ridiculousness of cultural theory, began creating these cards. It was a modest idea. The great thinkers of cultural and media theory, such as Foucault, Bell Hooks, Said, Deleuze, and Guattari, can be reduced to trading cards in the same way that children were trading Pokémon on…

The idea of trading a Michel Foucault card for a Judith Butler card, similar to how children used to trade Charizards on a school playground, is both a little ridiculous and a little amazing. But when David Gauntlett introduced the Theory.org.uk Trading Cards back in 2000, he created precisely that small, strange universe. A media professor with a sense of humour and a soft spot for cultural theory, Gauntlett released them one a month, slowly, almost casually, as if he wasn’t entirely sure anyone would care. People did. First softly, then loudly. The first card out of the deck was…

The way Jacques Lacan entered and remained a part of Parisian intellectual life is almost theatrical. By most accounts, he was a challenging child of bourgeois respectability who was born in April 1901 into a comfortable Catholic family on the Right Bank of the city. His dad was an oil and soap salesman. His mom prayed. In a move that must have upset the family dinner table, his younger brother became a monk. In the meantime, Lacan drifted in the direction of Spinoza, atheism, medicine, and ultimately the beautiful but dark maze of the human mind. He was already running…

Bell Hooks’ insistence on using those lowercase letters has an almost stubborn quality. She took the name from Bell Blair Hooks, her great-grandmother, who was renowned in her family for having sharp opinions and a sharp tongue. She was the only one who decided to keep it modest and modest. She wanted readers to focus on the work itself rather than on her. Like most of her actions, this small act of refusal seemed to carry more weight than it actually did. In Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a segregated town where her mother cleaned white families’ homes and her father worked as…

Climbing above the world is how some thinkers explain it. The opposite was done by Erving Goffman. When a door refused to open, he crouched down, almost rudely, and observed what people did with their hands, eyes, throats, and little embarrassed laughter. He viewed the actions that we typically write off as insignificant, such as clearing one’s throat, apologizing, and avoiding tight spaces, as the real framework of social interactions. Even now, over forty years after his death in Philadelphia in 1982, reading him gives you the unnerving impression that someone has been surreptitiously recording your party behavior. Goffman was…

It began on a sickbed, of all places. In search of a philosopher he hardly knew, a restless psychotherapist named Félix Guattari drove three hours south from Paris into the cattle country of Limousin during the summer of 1969. He discovered Gilles Deleuze recuperating from surgery, propped up and having trouble breathing because he was missing a lung. In those situations, most people would greet each other and walk away. These two began a dialogue that continued for the next twenty-two years. It’s difficult not to question what they perceived in one another that afternoon. The pairing didn’t make sense…