Author: Melissa Bridwell

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…

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…