Author: Melissa Bridwell

In sociology seminars all over the world, a game is played, almost imperceptibly. A theory is presented by someone. It is contested by someone else. De Beauvoir is pulled out by someone. The room suddenly changes. It has occurred in cramped postgraduate offices in Manchester, bright lecture halls in Nairobi, and packed seminar rooms in Lahore where the whiteboard markers are constantly dry and ceiling fans sway overhead. Simone de Beauvoir appears everywhere, and she nearly always prevails. When you spend time with people who work as social scientists, it’s difficult to ignore this. Other theoretical references just don’t have…

A tiny laminated theory card that is tucked into the back of a course pack, almost like an afterthought, is making the rounds in university semiotics and media studies classes. It features a quotation from Roland Barthes, a French philosopher and literary critic who devoted much of his career to doing what most scholars shied away from: examining commonplace objects and posing difficult questions about them. wine. vehicles. Steak. soap. the items of daily existence. Nevertheless, what he discovered within those commonplace items proved to be more illuminating than anything found in boardrooms or lecture halls. Building on a series…

A certain type of product finds its audience through something more akin to word-of-mouth and mild disbelief than through marketing campaigns or shelf placement. That includes Theory Trading Cards, which are tiny, illustrated collectibles with the faces and concepts of influential academics. At first glance, they appear to be a joke created by a graduate student. After picking one up and reading the back, you come to the conclusion that it might be the most helpful thing you’ve come across this semester. The cards were made in 2001 by British media and communications professor David Gauntlett, who seems to have…

Every classroom has a moment when you can sense that collective, quiet drift. glaze in the eyes. Pens come to a stop. Despite its importance, the material isn’t landing. Every teacher who has ever stood in front of a class is familiar with that moment. What to do about it is less certain. A deck of cards, an almost embarrassingly basic solution, has been appearing on the desks of more and more instructors. The 21-Card Gauntlett Deck isn’t very eye-catching. Neither a dashboard nor a subscription fee are included. However, it provides something that most curricula subtly fail to provide…

Most Thursday afternoons, a loose group of four or five people spread out a deck of cards at a specific table at a coffee shop on Franklin Avenue in Bed-Stuy and begin arguing. Not with regard to poker hands. About media identity, David Gauntlett, and whether Instagram has actually altered young men’s perceptions of masculinity. The cards are printed with theoretical frameworks that most people only come across in a $300 university textbook, laminated, and color-coded. This is the Gauntlett Theory Card Deck, and for some reason, café culture in Brooklyn has welcomed it much more than lecture halls, where…

Nowadays, there’s a good chance that Patricia Hill Collins is on the reading list at practically every graduate sociology seminar. Not as background information. as the base. Although Collins herself frequently has, that change did not occur overnight or in a quiet manner. The fact that the woman who wrote about being “virtually silenced” in her youth is now at the center of some of the most heated debates in American higher education is quietly remarkable. Collins was born in a working-class Black neighborhood in Philadelphia in 1948. Growing up, Collins witnessed her mother, who had intended to become an…

Not even the gates had opened. Some of the fans were holding printed confirmation emails like boarding passes as they waited in line far beyond the typical entry points, such as food trucks and souvenir shops. They didn’t arrive in time for batting practice. A cardboard rectangle enclosed in a plastic sleeve was the reason they were there. In just 22 minutes, the MLB Trading Card Night promotion—a limited giveaway given to the first few thousand ticketed attendees—sold out. Twenty-two. People were posting about it online by the end of the third inning; some were happy, some angry, and most…

On some weekends, Albuquerque experiences something subtly strange. On a Sunday, you might anticipate a regional sales conference or a wedding reception when you enter the Embassy Suites. Rather, there are binders full of Pokémon holofoils, tables covered in collector sleeves, and Magic: Funko Pops lined up with the kind of attention most people save for fine china, and the Gathering sets spread out like poker hands. Every stop the Cards and More Expo makes in New Mexico seems to generate a little more enthusiasm than the last. This is not how it began. What started out as a modest…

When a professor says it’s time to talk about media theory or critical framework, students have a certain expression. It could be a slow blink, a quiet exhale, or even a subtle retreat behind a laptop screen. This appearance is familiar to anyone who has spent time in a university lecture hall. Before the walk home, it’s the face of someone who has already decided that what comes next will be complex, abstract, and mostly unmemorable. This was observed by Bournemouth University. They created trading cards, which sounds almost too informal to be taken seriously. Cards with the names of…

Holding a trading card that genuinely inquires about Theodor Adorno’s astrological sign has a subtly ridiculous quality. And yet that’s exactly what David Gauntlett produced in 2000, releasing a set of theory trading cards through his website theory.org.uk that nobody in academic publishing had thought to make before. Or maybe they had thought of it, decided it was too strange, and moved on. Gauntlett didn’t. The cards showed up at a specific time. Media studies in Britain was still finding its footing as a serious discipline, fighting off the perception that it was a soft option compared to history or…