Author: Melissa Bridwell

Many American attics currently contain a shoebox filled with hundreds of 1990 Donruss baseball cards that no one bothered to discard but also no one thought to value. The shoebox is hidden behind old tax records and forgotten holiday decorations. Those cards simply sat there for the majority of the last thirty years, victims of the massive overproduction catastrophe collectors euphemistically refer to as the “Junk Wax Era.” The reasoning was straightforward: too many cards were printed, there was insufficient demand, and there was no value. As it happens, that math wasn’t totally accurate. The 1990 Donruss set is experiencing…

Witnessing something that was once dismissed find its moment brings a certain kind of satisfaction. For years, Theory Trading Cards—physical cards with sociological theorists, important ideas, and learning frameworks—were viewed as a peculiarity. A first. The kind of item that a well-intentioned teacher purchases at a conference, stores in a drawer, and then forgets. Then they began to show up on seminar tables in a low-key manner without making any big announcements. readers in the course. Apparently at American art fairs, though it’s unclear exactly how that occurred. The art fairs are an important detail to pay attention to because…

By eight in the morning, the folding tables are already packed. Guys wearing snapbacks and vintage jerseys are navigating small aisles, glancing at slabs of graded cards and asking prices they already know are too high. However, the longest lines aren’t always drawn by a single card at card shows from Phoenix to Philadelphia. The box is sealed. An enigma box. Furthermore, no one inside appears to be completely certain whether what they’re doing qualifies as gambling or shopping. Most likely both. The mystery box format, which involves paying a set price and receiving a random selection of sealed goods,…

A trading card has an almost ridiculously basic quality. A little rectangle of paper with a few lines of text on the back and a name on the front. For decades, children have been tossing them between lunch tables. However, between the 1990s Pokémon craze and the current $15.8 billion trading card market, educators began to notice what collectors had always known: cards encourage interaction. They provoke discussion, debate, comparison, and memory. This was discovered by Bournemouth University with remarkable clarity. The university created its own deck of theory cards specifically to make cultural theory less intimidating in response to…

Most people have a moment when one idea completely rearranges the furniture in their head, usually in between a late-night internet rabbit hole and a college seminar. Gender is not something you are, according to a philosopher named Judith Butler, who introduced this concept to an unexpected number of people over the past thirty years. It’s something you do over and over again until it seems natural to you. Butler, who holds an endowed chair in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and employs they/them pronouns, made this case most persuasively in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. Butler’s prose requires patience,…

You start to question which student is truly learning when you see them arranging LEGO figures on a table to map out their understanding of identity or staring blankly at a semiotics reading. For decades, David Gauntlett, a British media scholar and professor who focused much of his career on that particular question, maintained that it was the second student. Making something tangible requires a type of thinking that is rarely required by passive reading, not because tactile work is simpler. Gauntlett’s most talked-about book, Making is Connecting, which was released in 2011, made the main point very clear: creativity…

The way Angela Davis is now featured on curricula has an almost subdued radical quality. Not in the margins, not as an additional footnote to something more “canonical,” but right in the middle—listed next to Foucault, ahead of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and sometimes even before the first week of classes. According to a psychobiography that was published in the European Journal of Psychology, she has spent more than seven decades navigating issues of race, class, gender, and American social policy as a writer, academic, and political activist. It feels significant to be both an activist and an academic at the same…

You’ll notice a change if you visit practically any card store in America today. The glass cases continue to glow with the same recognizable hues—chrome, refractor, and autograph stickers tucked under protective sleeves—and the man behind the counter still sports a faded team jersey. However, if you take out your phone and aim it at a card, an algorithm somewhere will tell you the exact value of that piece of cardboard in a matter of seconds. The pastime still has its soul. It is merely receiving some mechanical assistance. The trading card market, which flourished during the pandemic years and…

A trading card on a university desk has a subtle disarming quality. It is tactile, compact, and a little outdated in the age of tablets and AI tutors. However, an unexpected development occurred somewhere between the hand-drawn annotations and the laminated edges: researchers began to pay close attention. Neither a heavily funded neuroscience department nor an edtech lab in Silicon Valley produced the study that is currently receiving the most citations in education innovation circles for 2025. It originated from a classroom experiment centered around collectible cards, namely theory trading cards intended to aid students in understanding abstract academic frameworks.…

Watching something truly brilliant be overlooked year after year in favor of the tried-and-true is a particular kind of frustration. Marx on the whiteboard, Weber in the syllabus, and Durkheim dog-eared in someone’s backpack are the usual suspects that dominate the conversation when you walk into any social theory seminar. Norbert Elias was then discreetly tucked away in a corner of the reading list—perhaps a footnote, perhaps nothing at all. Without exaggeration, the most overlooked card in any sociological collection is the theory card that highlights his work. That has been the situation for many years. And it’s really perplexing.…