Author: Melissa Bridwell

Almost all American graduate schools of education have a battered copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed on their shelves. After reading it once, the majority of students underline a few passages before moving on. That could be one of the more serious errors made in today’s academic environment. Paulo Freire was born in Recife, in the arid and harsh northeastern region of Brazil, in 1921. He didn’t think about theory when he was younger. He was keeping an eye on hunger. He was taking in the silence of those who had been told, in a hundred subtle ways, that they…

A waiting list exists. Even though it seems insignificant, it is worth pondering for a little while. A card-based learning series based on practice and creative thinking has somehow created more demand than twelve U.S. institutions can currently handle in a time when academic publishers are going through their own slow reckoning, universities are struggling to justify enrollment numbers, and entire humanities departments are being quietly defunded. September is when classes begin. All of the seats have already been taken. For those who are still catching up, the David Gauntlett Card Series is based on a body of work that…

When a lecturer uses a word that a first-generation student has never heard and the legacy student across the table nods as if it were nothing, there’s a certain quiet in a college seminar room. I’ve seen it. A slight stiffening of the shoulders, a look down at the notepad, and a silent choice not to ask are all tiny and nearly undetectable. The experience is the same whether the term is “hegemony,” “habitus,” “intersectionality,” or simply “epistemic.” Everyone else in the room seems to know a vocabulary that you missed, and while it’s not your fault, the difference is…

Every time I consider the irony that permeates this entire issue, I can’t help but smile. The most popular card in every deck is, by far, the theory card that is most difficult to fit on a four-by-six sheet of cardstock. The white whale of sociology trading cards is Jacques Derrida, the philosopher whose entire career was an argument against tidy summaries, set meanings, and the very kind of tidy compression a stat card represents. Pupils are constantly requesting him. The cards continue to sell out. The most well-liked memento of his ideas is the item he most cautioned against.…

This year, a modest, somewhat ridiculous scene is unfolding at art fairs all throughout the nation, and it usually takes the same form at each one. At a booth, a collector wearing pricey shoes pulls out cash after picking up what appears to be a Pokémon card, examining it under the lights, and asking the artist how many were created. The dimensions of the card are 2.5 by 3.5 inches. Usually, the cost is a fixed seventy-five dollars, though occasionally the holographic ones cost more. The rarer themed cards are sold out, according to a scribbled notice, and the booth…

Every meaningful interaction with Louis Althusser has a moment when the environment you’re in begins to seem a little different. With a little unpleasant click, you realize that nearly everything on your desk, including the lamp, the half-watched show on your laptop, and the dishes in the sink, was put there by forces that intended you to want precisely what you do. The peculiar thing about the theory card is that, when done correctly, a single 4-by-6 sheet of paper can sometimes accomplish this task more effectively than the original 80-page essay. Althusser is not betrayed by the compression. It’s…

Anyone who has ever had to learn sociology for an exam experiences a certain dread, which usually manifests about the third hour of staring at a notebook filled with identical-looking phrases from deceased Germans. Marx made a statement regarding labor. Weber shared his thoughts about bureaucracy. Regarding social truths, Durkheim had something to say. By the time you’ve read it five times, the names start to blur and you’ve learned almost nothing. They all stated it in slightly different variations of the same austere academic style. Because they replicate the problem in smaller form—a word on one side and a…

Pre-boarding procedures at Gate B14 in Dallas/Fort Worth’s Terminal B, which most travelers consider to be pointless, have recently taken on a new twist. Passengers waiting to board American Airlines flights have been observed asking gate attendants a somewhat different inquiry than usual: whether the pilots have any cards left. This query has nothing to do with the availability of overhead bins or the status of upgrades. First-come, first-served collectible aircraft trading cards will be given out by flight crew as part of the airline’s 100th anniversary celebration. There will be seven million of them. Nevertheless, there seems to be…

A child in America opened a pack of Donruss cards in 1966, took out a Spider-Man, gave it a quick glance, and most likely tucked it into a pocket, a shoebox, or a bicycle spoke. In 1966, you used cards like those. They weren’t sleeved by you. They were not sent for grading by you. You traded them, used them, distorted them, and eventually lost them to the specific entropy that consumes most childhood memories. There are currently fewer than 400 PSA-graded copies of that Spider-Man card because that occurred at scale, among millions of packs sold with bubble gum…

The Laugh Factory’s sign is illuminated on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a section of the street that has seen enough reinventions in the entertainment business to be rather unshakeable. Most nights, someone is performing for an audience that came particularly to laugh—not to watch content or stream a special, but to be in the room as someone attempts to be funny in real time, which is a distinct and far more vulnerable thing. Jamie Masada, the club’s founder, has been in charge since 1979. Despite his many comedic instincts, his most recent one has caused a reaction for which the…