Author: Melissa Bridwell

On most afternoons, students will spread small illustrated cards across their notebooks at a table in Columbia University’s Butler Library, much like someone might sort a deck before a poker game. These aren’t poker cards, though. Each one has a simplified framework on the back and the face of a theorist on the front, such as Derrida, Spivak, Bell Hooks, or Foucault. A syllabus is being annotated by someone nearby. Another person is discreetly attempting to exchange a first-edition Judith Butler card for a duplicate Althusser. It sounds almost ridiculous. However, as you watch it develop, you get the impression…

Before her Tuesday night class, Carmen, a sociology instructor at a Rio Grande Valley community college, laid out forty laminated cards on a folding table. Each card featured a face, such as Durkheim, Goffman, or Bell Hooks, along with a few facts on the reverse. Before entering that room, the majority of her students worked full shifts. The assigned textbook had not been purchased by any of them. Some had never owned one before. However, they took the cards, flipped them over, and began conversing. All across the nation, underfunded universities and community learning centers are silently reenacting that scene…

Once you hear it, a certain image comes to mind. Somewhere in a suburb outside of London, a young Lewis Hamilton is buying football packs and Pokémon cards with his weekly allowance. carefully flipping them over. examining the bolded names, the gloss, and the edges. That kind of information is easily written off as a clever origin story for a press release. However, those who have followed Hamilton closely over the years are aware that he hardly ever performs nostalgia. When he said something, it usually meant something to him. This is likely why, at least not yet, Lewis Hamilton’s…

Renata Hollis, an eighth-grade civics teacher in a mobile classroom outside of Columbus, Ohio, lays out a pile of glossy cards on a folding table. A small portrait, a color-coded badge in the corner, and a distinct claim are carried by each. Some are classified as logical fallacies. Others enumerate propaganda strategies, rhetorical devices, or the names of particular cognitive biases. Her students lean in, half suspicious, half curious, the way teens do when something looks like a game but has a faint homework odor. More American classrooms are using these theory trading cards than anyone could have predicted a…

For many years, inquiring about women’s soccer in a card shop felt almost like an apology. Owners would shrug. Perhaps somewhere in the back, hidden beneath boxes of basketball prizes and football rookies, was a Parkside set. Perhaps not. Women’s sports seldom made the cut, and the shelves told a tale about what the hobby considered important. That narrative is beginning to shift. The National Women’s Soccer League and its Players Association announced a multi-year partnership with Panini America on March 11, making the collectibles giant the league’s and its Players Association’s exclusive trading card partner. The agreement was reached…

Nobody could have predicted that a card game created by a math professor in 1993 would become the main source of funding for one of the biggest toy companies worldwide. And yet, here we are. Wizards of the Coast carried Hasbro on its back, with Magic doing the majority of the heavy lifting, according to the company’s most recent earnings, which were released in February. In just the fourth quarter, revenues increased by 31%. That’s an odd place to land for a brand that used to be synonymous with lunchroom oddities and basement hobbies. It is nearly impossible to visualize…

Eight men are seated around a folding table in a beige room on the second floor of a medium-security facility in upstate New York. They are leaning forward over what appears to be a Magic: The Gathering game. There are names on the cards. Confirmation bias. The Socratic Approach. Occam’s Razor. A man in his mid-forties taps a card on the table, laughs at a recent statement made by another player, and half-jokingly accuses him of being a straw man. The instructor, a volunteer from a local community college, stays out of the way. She simply observes, much like you…

Even three years after her passing, Dorothy E. Smith continues to make appearances in classrooms for reasons that border on stubbornness. In late spring, if you stroll through any undergraduate sociology department, you’ll probably see a student bent over a laptop, muttering words like “ruling relations” or “the everyday world as problematic.” It’s not a coincidence. The work that, to be honest, most introductory textbooks have failed to do for years has been done by a simple study card that is making the rounds on flashcard platforms. It breaks down Smith’s main ideas into eight succinct bullet points. The card…

I first saw an entire AltaMira Press set in person in the office of a graduate teaching assistant in upstate New York sometime in 2019. The TA handled them like a 1999 Pokémon holographic, and they were in a Ziploc bag, of all things. Twenty-one two-sided cards with slightly yellowed corners. He had paid forty-two dollars for the used set, and he was already boasting about it in private. A sealed set selling for almost three hundred dollars was mentioned by someone on a media-studies listserv last week. For what David Gauntlett himself has called a side project from 2006…

Even before anyone speaks, you can sense the old argument in practically every humanities seminar on the East Coast these days. Within minutes, the room divides along an invisible line drawn somewhere between Frankfurt and Paris after someone mentions dominance and another mentions power. Like Trump cards, the names are thrown out. Adorno on one side. For the other, Foucault. The ideas themselves hardly have time to breathe because everything happens so fast. The conflict predates the majority of those involved. Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher who lived in a modest Los Angeles home during his exile in America and…