Until recently, the person with the Theory Trading Card taped above their desk was almost always a graduate student in sociology with an unfinished thesis and an intense, somewhat defensive love for Foucault. That is beginning to change. The cards have been forced out of seminar rooms and into a much louder, messier discussion about who gets remembered and who is subtly left in the footnotes thanks to the deck’s most recent expansion, which is centered around social justice thinkers.
For those who don’t know, Theory Trading Cards are nothing new. More than 20 years ago, David Gauntlett developed the original idea to make dense academic figures feel more like baseball stats than homework. Marx received a card. Bell Hooks, Anthony Giddens, and Judith Butler also did. It was specialized, a little silly, and adored by the same people who would quarrel over coffee about Adorno. The audience has changed. With TikTok unboxings and mild outrage over who’s included, social media has transformed a quiet teaching tool into something more akin to a TCG drop.
The expansion of social justice directly taps into that energy. Stuart Hall made the cut, and it’s obvious why: his card is said to sell out more quickly than the majority of the deck, and cultural studies departments have been secretly enamored with him for years. Along with Patricia Hill Collins and, most notably, Angela Davis, W.E.B. Du Bois also entered, sparking the kind of discussion that academic Twitter thrives on. The headline names are completed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose card is based on intersectionality and appears to be easier to understand visually than it was on a syllabus.
Nearly as much can be said about what is absent as about what is present. Despite being mainstays in the kinds of courses this deck is obviously intended for, neither Audre Lorde nor Frantz Fanon made this round. There is no official explanation for the gaps, only conjecture about space constraints, licensing issues, or perhaps the uncomfortable fact that an entire discipline cannot fit into a deck of cards. When fans began creating bootleg cards for theorists who had been rejected in 2004, it was the same criticism leveled at the original Gauntlett set.
It’s difficult to ignore how much this reflects current events in the larger collectibles industry. Influencers, athletes, and now, it seems, critical theorists are all receiving the same treatment that was previously only given to rookie baseball players, which has quietly turned trading cards into a tens of billions of dollars industry once more. This is not just due to nostalgia. Gary Vaynerchuk has discussed how collectibles vie for the same attention that Twitch and TikTok already receive and manage to prevail. It feels less odd than it should when theory cards fall into the same cultural lane.
It is genuinely unclear if this expansion will endure or fade like a fad in the classroom. Because students seem to retain information better when debating whether Du Bois should have a higher “influence” stat than Comte, professors seem cautiously interested in it. Even though it’s a little ridiculous, there’s something almost touching about that. Academic concepts that are repackaged as something to gather and debate rather than simply commit to memory and forget.
