Author: Melissa Bridwell

I first came across a Bell Hooks theory card on a study table in a small college library in upstate New York, nestled inside a worn-out copy of Teaching to Transgress. Her name was written in lowercase, as she always insisted, and the card was hand-drawn with uneven lettering. The kinds of statistics that sociology students have begun to take for granted surrounded her portrait. Influence: 96. Accessibility: 99. Almost shyly, the student who drew it told me that she had also made one for Foucault, but no one ever requested to borrow it. That little detail is telling in…

A sophomore’s cards were arranged across the table like a miniature museum exhibit in a campus café close to a state university, and that’s when it truly clicked for me. The word anomie was scribbled in the corner like a secret, and Durkheim was on top, sketched in soft pencil. She wasn’t reading. She was organizing. She was, in some way, studying in a way that most students never quite manage when they have a textbook open while she was quietly sorting. That is the peculiarity of Theory Trading Cards. At first, they appear to be a joke. A first.…

At the center of the trading card boom is a minor irony that no one in the industry seems to discuss much. Some of the card players who earn the most money have never watched the games they play. They have no idea who is attractive in the AFC South. They were unable to identify a starting rotation. The difference between the price of a sealed Costco football box on a Tuesday afternoon and what viewers of a livestream will pay for it by Tuesday night is what they are obsessed with. Among them is Steven Forrest. He co-owns Bull…

When I first saw a Theory Trading Card, we were seated in a semi-empty café close to a university library. It had mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu that had not been updated in months. The student on the other side of me moved it across the table in a manner similar to passing a picture. Karl Marx, sketched in thick ink, staring at nothing. Influence: 99. Optimism: 12. After laughing, I thought about it for a week. That’s what makes these cards peculiar. At first, they appear to be a joke. They resemble baseball cards more than anything you’d…

From suburban California to rural Texas, an odd phenomenon is occurring in classrooms. Teachers are reaching beyond the worksheets and using a deck of cards instead, frustrated by years of test preparation and predetermined curricula. Not Uno. The Gathering is not magic. A stack of fifty printed rectangles that are meant to provoke children to argue, defend, reconsider, and sometimes sit in uncomfortable silence while they think is something quieter and, in its own way, far more subversive. Depending on who is using it, the deck goes by several names. One version, known as the Critical Creativity Activity Cards, is…

It began on a forum thread that no one significant was reading, as these things frequently do. In the days following September 11, 2001, someone scanned and posted an old card from the 1990s video game Illuminati: New World Order, which featured a tower in flames with smoke curling toward a corner caption. The picture went viral. After that, it was dormant for some time. Then, in 2016, it reappeared, but this time it was linked to a different kind of upheaval: the election of a red-hat-wearing real estate developer to the US presidency. The game was not intended to…

There’s a good chance someone has photocopied the same essay if you walk into nearly any graduate seminar on gender and technology this spring. The copy on the table belongs to the person who arrived at the library first, and the pages are typically dog-eared and occasionally annotated in three different colors of ink. This year marks the strange 40th anniversary of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a piece of writing that still seems to have been submitted just a week ago. After the Socialist Review asked American socialist feminists to publicly consider the direction the movement was taking under Reagan, Haraway…

When I first saw a stack of David Gauntlett theory cards, they were on a shelf in a tiny classroom in north London. The corners of the cards were slightly bent from being passed around by sixteen-year-olds. Almost apologetically, the teacher informed me that the children found them helpful. They lacked gloss. They weren’t elegant. Butler, Hall, Hooks, and Gauntlett himself—a quiet British sociologist who graduated from the University of York in 1992 and spent decades contemplating how people construct their sense of self through media—just cards with quotes, prompts, names, and ideas. The story was meant to end there.…

When you walk through the back rows of a freshman lecture hall in late September, the trading card is the first thing you notice. Half-laminated and occasionally coffee-stained, it is tucked into a binder. A neat column of “five fun facts” appears on one side, while a black-and-white photo of a sociologist—typically McLuhan, occasionally Goffman, and occasionally Stuart Hall if the professor is feeling ambitious—appears on the other. There will be a long pause if you ask the student who made it what the theorist actually argued. They will respond right away if you ask them what year the theorist…

The actual auction wasn’t particularly noteworthy. A roll-up door, a padlock that the facility manager had cut, and perhaps nine or ten bidders in a half-circle in the kind of late-morning light that makes everything appear a little more depressing than it actually is. Under $1,000, the bidding stopped. In the rear, there was inexpensive furniture and a Sega Genesis with one controller missing. No one appeared excited. The victor shrugged in the manner of those who have already mentally discounted the expense. The boxes were what he initially failed to notice. The labels on four plastic totes that were…