Author: Melissa Bridwell

I first learned about David Gauntlett’s Theory Trading Cards while watching a graduate student shuffle them like a poker hand in a Brooklyn coffee shop. She was getting ready for an oral exam. Judith Butler was in her right palm, and Foucault was in her left. I found it both ridiculous and strangely clever, transforming the intricate framework of cultural theory into something you could spread out on a coffee table. The British sociologist Gauntlett had no intention of becoming well-known in the field of American media studies. The cards were a small side project from 2006 that was primarily…

Even though you wouldn’t know it from the national headlines, there is a subtle cleverness to what is going on in Grand Forks this winter. The North Dakota men’s basketball team chose to take an almost retro approach while the rest of college basketball focuses on NIL valuations and transfer portal drama. Trading cards were printed by them. There were sixteen. And the first 200 spectators to enter the gates of six conference home games will receive them, one batch at a time. It’s the kind of concept that seems insignificant until you give it some thought. With three player…

Football trading cards move silently between collectors who are well-versed in what they’re looking at in a section of eBay that most people never visit. One listing has been gaining attention lately: a five-card lot of Eli Manning cards from his time at Ole Miss. Originally priced at about $1.99, the lot is now selling for almost three times that amount. Not money that can change your life. However, the pattern is intriguing and provides insight into how Giants supporters are interpreting Manning’s peculiar midlife. The cards are not uncommon in and of themselves. Manning’s college cards were printed in…

You can see it right away if you walk into any card shop on a Saturday afternoon. Glass cases shine, fluorescent lights buzz overhead, and somewhere in the back, a teen is tearing into a brand-new booster box while an older man wearing a faded baseball cap looks on with a mixture of curiosity and silent disapproval. This tiny, nearly undetectable tension reveals everything about the current state of this pastime. It wasn’t intended for theory trading cards to turn into a battlefield. Like the majority of card categories, they began with basic cardboard and modest goals. The first cards…

Not too long ago, media studies students from Boston to Birmingham would silently pass a small deck of cards between their hands in seminar rooms. At first glance, they appeared to be items that a teenager might exchange in a schoolyard. shiny fronts. pictures. A hint of irony. But when you turned them over, you saw Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, or Judith Butler distilled into a few key ideas. One of those uncommon teaching tools that made complex concepts seem almost playable was the AltaMira Press edition of Theory Trading Cards, which was released in the early 2000s and was…

The Theory.org trading cards have led an odd double life for years, existing somewhere between an inside joke and a valid teaching tool. The majority of media studies students unintentionally come across them while studying for a test, typically in search of a quick way to comprehend Stuart Hall or Judith Butler. Each card summarizes a theorist in a few short sentences and is printed in a flat, slightly retro style. They are strangely endearing. They have an almost punk-like quality. Occasionally, a teacher will then point out that one card is more difficult to locate than the others while…

I first came across a Bell Hooks theory card on a study table in a small college library in upstate New York, nestled inside a worn-out copy of Teaching to Transgress. Her name was written in lowercase, as she always insisted, and the card was hand-drawn with uneven lettering. The kinds of statistics that sociology students have begun to take for granted surrounded her portrait. Influence: 96. Accessibility: 99. Almost shyly, the student who drew it told me that she had also made one for Foucault, but no one ever requested to borrow it. That little detail is telling in…

A sophomore’s cards were arranged across the table like a miniature museum exhibit in a campus café close to a state university, and that’s when it truly clicked for me. The word anomie was scribbled in the corner like a secret, and Durkheim was on top, sketched in soft pencil. She wasn’t reading. She was organizing. She was, in some way, studying in a way that most students never quite manage when they have a textbook open while she was quietly sorting. That is the peculiarity of Theory Trading Cards. At first, they appear to be a joke. A first.…

At the center of the trading card boom is a minor irony that no one in the industry seems to discuss much. Some of the card players who earn the most money have never watched the games they play. They have no idea who is attractive in the AFC South. They were unable to identify a starting rotation. The difference between the price of a sealed Costco football box on a Tuesday afternoon and what viewers of a livestream will pay for it by Tuesday night is what they are obsessed with. Among them is Steven Forrest. He co-owns Bull…

When I first saw a Theory Trading Card, we were seated in a semi-empty café close to a university library. It had mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu that had not been updated in months. The student on the other side of me moved it across the table in a manner similar to passing a picture. Karl Marx, sketched in thick ink, staring at nothing. Influence: 99. Optimism: 12. After laughing, I thought about it for a week. That’s what makes these cards peculiar. At first, they appear to be a joke. They resemble baseball cards more than anything you’d…