In the best way possible, it’s almost funny. A small test has been going on in American college classrooms, somewhere between a deck of Pokémon cards and a worn-out copy of C. Wright Mills. Professors are giving out trading cards—real, physical cards—with short summaries of decades of critical thought by living and dead sociologists and theorists. It looks like the students are paying attention.
It wasn’t a movement at first. At first, it was just a stopgap. Sociology has always had a problem with being hard to get into. The field asks really interesting questions, like why do some people go back to prison more often, how does social class affect health outcomes, and what does cultural production really say about power? But the theories that support those questions can feel so vague that they make you feel alone. Bourdieu’s theory of fields. Habermas on the idea of communicative rationality. Hegemony of Gramsci. You can’t make a five-minute YouTube video to explain these ideas.
The trading card format gets around that wall in a quiet way. Each card has the name and picture of a theorist along with a short summary of their main point, when they lived, and one or two lines that connect their ideas to something that happens in our everyday lives. In a way, the format itself is educationally interesting; it forces the kind of extreme compression that really tests whether a professor knows their material well enough to explain it in simple terms.
You should find out where this came from. The idea came from theory.org.uk, a British site about cultural studies, which made sociologist trading cards for students as a kind of joke in the early 2000s. In the same way that a well-designed infographic can say something that a long paragraph can’t, the idea was both fun and serious. In the critical theory space, they were being written about as new ideas by the early 2010s. One difference is that American sociology professors now use them as part of their courses instead of just giving them out as extras.
There is now what some teachers call a “sociologist player card” assignment in the first year sociology module at some community colleges and liberal arts schools. Students have to make their own cards by researching a theorist, boiling down complicated arguments to their most basic logic, and then formatting and showing their peers what they’ve come up with. Making the card is what you have to do. The result is that you understand the theory.
That’s not a small difference. Raka Ray, a professor at Berkeley, once said that sociology is a lot like detective work: it involves finding patterns, gathering evidence, and drawing careful conclusions. The same steps are needed to teach students how to make a trading card. It’s not possible to fake your way through summarizing Émile Durkheim if you don’t know what anomie means in real life. In a way that a multiple-choice test doesn’t always do, the format forces intellectual honesty.
This event seems more important than just a classroom trick because it fits into a bigger picture. More than 400 pages have been taken out of Florida’s state-approved sociology textbook. These pages include chapters on race, gender, media, and global inequality. There are course frameworks with lists of topics that professors are not allowed to talk about, and at least one teacher who had taught gender sociology for years has quietly stopped teaching the class. You should keep a close eye on what’s happening in Florida, because the pressure that’s being put on sociology teachers there could affect how sociology is taught in other places in ways that we can’t see yet.
In this situation, the trading card method seems quietly strong. It doesn’t say that it is political. It just makes the ideas easier to carry around, share, and throw out. You don’t need a semester-long framework to start a real conversation with a card on W.E.B. Du Bois and double consciousness. A student who is interested and three minutes are all you need.
It’s still not clear if this method can be used in more structured settings than just one classroom at a time. It’s hard not to notice, though, that the most durable teaching tools are usually the ones that treat students like real people who can be intellectually engaged, not like empty containers waiting to be filled with approved content.
