Author: Melissa Bridwell

A Theory11 playing card review’s comment area and a media theory trading card review’s comment section appear to originate from separate parts of the internet. One is full of magicians debating the quality of the stock and if the tuck box gilding is better than it was in the previous year. In the other, A-level media students argue over whether the back-of-card description is too simplistic or if the Stuart Hall card provides a sufficient explanation of encoding and decoding. Every now and then, a member of the incorrect audience stumbles into the other video, becomes perplexed, and leaves a…

UFC trading cards were available in the market for many years without much urgency. Products were available, collectors were concerned, and a small community engaged in secondary platform trading. However, compared to baseball or basketball, there wasn’t quite the same level of excitement. People who weren’t paying attention even a year ago are now trying to figure out what they missed because of how quickly things have changed. Through its collaboration with Fanatics Collectibles, Topps returned as the sole manufacturer of UFC cards, bringing with it the infrastructure that collectors are accustomed to from other major sports. With chrome technology,…

A student is attempting to fit Karl Marx onto a playing card-sized card in a sociology seminar at a mid-sized American university. Their dimensions are 2.5 by 3.5 inches. They must communicate Historical Materialism, which holds that all social interactions, institutions, and awareness are shaped by the material conditions of production, in a way that is both appropriate for that setting and still understandable to an outsider. It’s a more challenging workout than it seems, and that’s the whole point. Over the past few years, sociology trading cards have become more common in undergraduate lectures. The reasons instructors continue to…

The Magic: The Gathering community takes notice when Mark Rosewater signs something. For thirty years, that has been the case. Rosewater has been the game’s chief designer since 2003, has authored over a thousand weekly articles regarding game design, and is arguably the person who has had the greatest influence on how people view TCG mechanics. Therefore, it was natural, if incorrect, to assume that Mood Swings was a new mechanic or supplemental set coming to Magic when he arrived under the Secret Lair banner with his name attached. It isn’t. Mood Swings is a stand-alone card game. Its rules,…

For the final twenty years of his life, Zygmunt Bauman wrote volumes about the liquefaction of modern society. Long careers with single employers, long-lasting marriages, and communities bound together by common institutions and geography had all been replaced by more flexible structures. Nothing remains fixed. All of this is tentative. Due to the dissolution of the conventional structures that used to undertake that job, identity itself becomes a project you have to actively manage, constructing and reassembling your sense of self from consumer possibilities. After publishing the book in 2000 and giving it the name “liquid modernity,” he spent the…

There is a recurring theme in graduate seminars at American colleges. A reading of a book, movie, policy document, or architectural design is being presented by a student. The analysis is continuing. Subsequently, a person in the room aims for the same framework that they have been searching for since their very first theory lecture. stated. Orientalism. the fabrication of the East as the inferior Other in order to support Western supremacy. After the observation is made and recorded on the whiteboard, the discussion proceeds. This is how it has been for nearly fifty years. When Orientalism was published by…

A theory card, depending on who you ask, is either an essential missing element or the thing that derails an otherwise effective system. The phrase signifies different things to different communities — and in each of those communities, the fight about whether it belongs in the original set, or should have been included from the start, is continuing and often quite fierce. The most formally consequential version of this dispute sits in legal philosophy. H.L.A. Hart, whose 1961 book The Concept of Law became the classic text of English-language jurisprudence, spent years working on a Postscript responding to Ronald Dworkin’s…

In the Treasure Valley, the wait outside a Jacksons convenience store wasn’t for coffee or gas. For a set of trading cards, that is. Thirteen dollars, cardboard, and foil, showcasing athletes that the majority of the nation’s sports media has never reported on and most likely couldn’t identify, but that the people in that Boise parking lot could. When done with some creativity, a successful NIL effort truly looks like that scene, which was duplicated at ExtraMile stations throughout the region in the weeks after the drop. College trading cards were not created by Boise State. They accomplished something that…

Somewhere there’s a jar. Perhaps it’s hidden behind a pile of outdated textbooks. Perhaps it’s a real shoebox filled with loose notes and birthday cards from family members who felt that cash was more considerate than a gift receipt. Regardless of the container, the money within—accumulated over years of “save it for something important” moments—is most likely currently losing value in a low-key, ceremonial manner. This is not a story about a dramatic financial crisis. It’s smaller and more uncomfortable in many aspects. It has to do with the increasing expense of doing nothing with your existing funds. The average…

Somewhere in the middle of David Gauntlett’s career, you come to the realization that the man has been doing something genuinely out of the ordinary. writing about more than just creativity. Actually practicing it — in places that academic culture tends to quietly discourage. Gauntlett is a British sociologist and media theorist who currently works at Toronto Metropolitan University. Over the course of about thirty years, he has developed what could be called a portable version of media theory. His trading cards have recently found their way into American high school classrooms, condensing the ideas of philosophers such as Michel…