Author: Melissa Bridwell

The football card industry is currently experiencing a certain level of unease, which is evident in the message boards, Whatnot streams, and even the way store owners shrug when you inquire about Leaf products. Depending on your point of view within the hobby, the NFLPA’s May 1 lawsuit against Leaf Trading Cards is either long overdue or extremely aggressive. Honestly, probably both. The Texas-based card manufacturer is accused in the complaint, which was submitted to a federal court in Virginia, of using over six active NFL players in a 12-month period without obtaining a group licensing agreement. Everything revolves around…

The smell is the first thing you notice when you enter the house of someone who has 100,000 trading cards. Not too bad, in fact. Just specific. Something near library shelves on a muggy afternoon, the subtle sweetness of old cardboard. Typically, the cards are not visible. They reside in cardboard boxes that are stacked along a wall and are marked in marker with a date, a player’s last name, or nothing at all. People are surprised by that detail. More recent collectors envision spotlights and glass cases. The actual situation is more akin to a silent office storage room.…

It was not David Gauntlett’s intention to create anything for prisons. The cards he made, which were little printed prompts on identity, belonging, and self-expression, were intended for use in undergraduate seminars and sixth-form classrooms—the kinds of settings where Stuart Hall might be mentioned alongside Beyoncé. However, at some point, the cards made their way. They found themselves enrolled in educational programs inside British prisons in a covert and nearly undetectable manner. It’s the kind of diversion that scholars seldom anticipate. Gauntlett, a sociologist best known in the UK for his identity theory and his love of Lego as a…

When I first saw one of these zines, it was partially concealed behind a pile of lanyards on a folding table at a small media studies conference in Leeds. The cover of Foucault’s card had a moustache drawn on it. The photocopies were a bit too dark, the pages were crooked, and the margins were filled with handwritten notes that had been crossed out. To be honest, it appeared to have been prepared at two in the morning on a kitchen table. However, the five-page lead essay, which discussed Tracey Emin’s card and the politics of confessional art, was more…

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…