Author: Melissa Bridwell

The morning routine has subtly changed in a third-grade classroom in a suburban area of Ohio. Students are distributing little laminated cards—not sports figures or Pokémon—before reading groups and math. David Gauntlett, a media theorist, discusses identity, gender representation, and how our perceptions of ourselves are shaped by the images we view on these cards. The teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, claims that the children are more involved than she anticipated. But when some parents opened those backpacks, their reactions were quite different. Originally developed about eighteen years ago as a downloadable teaching tool for British A-Level Media Studies…

A tangible item that endures the great purge has a subtle quality. You are aware of that terrible afternoon when a student rips through boxes, discards seminar readings, gives away three-pound textbooks, and completely destroys a bedroom’s remnants of college life. The majority of theoretical materials fail. In some way, the Judith Butler trading card does. The Theory Trading Cards were developed by Bournemouth University as a teaching aid for first-year media students, who are often intimidated by the idea of academic theory in general. With just a picture, a name, and a few words on the back, the format…

Watching a graduate student slide a laminated card across a seminar table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as if they’re exchanging a rookie shortstop for an experienced closer, has a subtly ridiculous quality. This card’s face isn’t a baseball player, though. Max Weber is here. or Karl Marx. Or, if you’re especially unlucky in the trade, Herbert Marcuse’s infamously unimpressed gaze. For a few years now, theory trading cards—small, tangible cards with important concepts and portraits of prominent social thinkers—have been floating around sociology classrooms. At first, the majority of academics disregarded them as a novelty—the kind of thing a well-intentioned lecturer…

On any given Tuesday morning, you might notice something a little strange if you walk into an Ohio University sociology lecture. Students are not squinting at PDFs on cracked laptop screens or leafing through 400-page hardcovers. Some of them have little laminated cards in their hands, the kind you’d find next to a rookie quarterback in a collector’s binder rather than in a classroom. The first time, it’s a strange sight. It begins to seem like it might make sense by the third or fourth time. At Ohio University, where the sociology department has long favored active, project-based learning, sociology…

Most anti-capitalism conferences have a folding table at the back that is filled with dog-eared pamphlets, photocopied zines, and books whose spines have been cracked so many times that the titles are hardly readable. There will almost certainly be a mention of Herbert Marcuse somewhere in that pile. Not all of his books. Sometimes it’s just a citation in someone’s manifesto, a quote on a card, or a name mentioned casually during a panel with the assurance of someone mentioning an old friend. The question of why is worthwhile. Eighty-one years old, Marcuse passed away in Starnberg, West Germany, in…

A professor at UCLA has a small set of cards by the lectern. It’s a simple deck of theory cards based on David Gauntlett’s theories about media and identity, not a textbook or printed syllabus. Colleagues who have heard her talk about it claim that she described it as the best fifteen dollars she had ever spent on schooling. That remark, which was made casually at a faculty mixer last spring, has subtly taken on a life of its own. It has always been a little challenging to summarize Gauntlett’s work in a conventional lecture. His main point, that media…

American Airlines flights are currently experiencing a subtly odd phenomenon. Before taking their seats, passengers approach the cockpit door and request trading cards from the pilots. Not a snack. not coupons for upgrades. Instead of boarding gates and overhead bins, trading cards are the type you’d associate with baseball diamonds and Saturday morning garage sales. As it happens, a surprisingly large number of people genuinely desire them. As part of its celebration of its 100th anniversary, American Airlines introduced its centennial trading card program in early May. The cards showcase aircraft from the airline’s current fleet, including the A321neo, 737-800,…

Every sociology teacher is familiar with a certain moment. Around the third sentence about “relations to the means of production,” you see people’s eyes go blank as you stand in front of a classroom with a marker in hand and try to simultaneously unravel the intellectual universe of Max Weber and Karl Marx. Not antagonistic. Simply vanished. This could be the point at which the majority of students permanently decide sociology isn’t for them, which would be a real loss because the concepts themselves are truly fascinating. In many respects, Marx and Weber were social theory’s first intellectual rivals. Marx…

The Gem Mint Cards security footage has a scene that sticks in your memory. With a plastic tote in hand, a masked figure moves through broken glass and approaches the display case by walking, not running. Without hesitation. Don’t look around anxiously. only for a purpose. Rare Pokémon cards valued at between $25,000 and $30,000 disappeared from the DeLand store in less than 75 seconds, and the suspect had already left. It appeared practiced. That level of self-assurance doesn’t just appear. Additionally, it becomes clear that this was not an isolated act of desperation when you begin to piece together…

Seeing an idea that began on the periphery of academic culture be taken seriously by the institutions that previously disregarded it has a subtle satisfying quality. AltaMira Press, a reputable publisher with ties to the academic publishing industry in the United States, has recently endorsed Theory Trading Cards, which are little physical cards with summaries and portraits of significant cultural and media theorists like Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Bell Hooks, and Jean Baudrillard. It’s the kind of confirmation that, depending on who you ask, was either completely unexpected or long overdue. The cards themselves are not brand-new. They started on…