Author: Melissa Bridwell

Pulling out a deck of cards about dead academics in 2026, the same year federal test results validated what many educators have long secretly suspected—that something fundamental is failing in American education—has a dusty kind of irony. The cards feel more like testimony than trivia. The federal government’s most recent statistics present a conflicting picture. Nine-year-olds have made some progress, regaining reading scores from before the pandemic and demonstrating a slight increase in math. That is really inspiring. However, 13-year-olds are a completely different matter. Their reading scores haven’t changed significantly since 2023, and this is the part that should…

A strange little teaching tool has made its way into American high school classrooms, somewhere between a Pokémon booster pack and a college syllabus. Originally developed as a downloadable PDF curiosity on his now-archived academic website theory.org.uk, Theory Trading Cards were created by British media scholar David Gauntlett back when the majority of today’s high school students were not yet born. The names, concepts, advantages, and disadvantages of media and cultural theorists are printed on the visually formatted, collectible-style cards, which resemble sports cards. A card is given to Stuart Hall. Roland Barthes also receives one. Indeed, Gauntlett himself agrees.…

Nowadays, almost every hobby store in the UK feels different when you walk in. Usually filled with vintage chase cards gathering silent admiration, the glass cases next to the register have been rearranged. Front and center are brand-new cards with price tags that, eighteen months ago, would have seemed ridiculous. In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the Mega Evolution era won’t end in July 2026. It already has in many respects. Official release dates are not anticipated by the secondary market. Really, it never has. However, there seems to be more intense pre-launch speculation surrounding the Mega Evolution – Pitch…

In the back of a community college classroom in Ohio, there’s a cardboard box that smells slightly of old laminate and is worn at the corners. Inside, there are cards that some instructors discreetly believe are more helpful than anything a student can access on a laptop in less than three seconds. These aren’t Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon cards. They are theory trading cards created especially to help students retain abstract academic ideas. They’ve been doing this for a longer period of time than Wikipedia, for some reason. Seldom is the history of trading cards as teaching aids taken…

A media professor by the name of David Gauntlett printed a series of little cards with social theorists like Foucault, Baudrillard, and Hall and posted them online via Theory.org.uk sometime in the year 2000. No venture capital. No roadmap for the product. Avoid growth hacking. Just cards, concepts, and a subdued conviction that abstract scholarly thought could be contained within something you would want to grasp. Gauntlett might not have known what he had done. The education technology sector is still catching up twenty-five years later. It’s ironic to watch Silicon Valley spend billions creating engagement mechanics like progress bars,…

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…