Speed Meeting

Source: Spelman College Section, National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) circa 2015-2016

Instructions

  • Divide the room in half – essentially, assigning participants to group one or group two

  • CREATE A NEW IDENTITY (be innovative). For example, I am Poinsettia, a fierce dancer and skydiver who performs midair while attached to a parachute.  

  • Questions to ask your counterpart:

    • Name and phone number

    • Zodiac Sign

    • What do you do for a living (ATTENDING SCHOOL IS NOT AN ANSWER)?

  • Allow the conversation to unfold. STAY IN CHARACTER!

  • In speed-dating fashion, sit individuals in front of each other, and rotate when the timer rings (e.g. ten minutes per dialogue)

Praxis (why + theory):

I have this soapbox about how the longer we are in school, the greater the distance grows between ourselves and our peers. Intimacy is increasingly removed from our learning spaces as classroom rules outlaw touch, unsanctioned interpersonal dialogue, and roaming between desks or different corners of the room. Less intimacy facilitates less vulnerability, and ultimately, less silliness occurs. In other words, this capacity for silliness–a distinct type of joy grounded in a mutual vulnerability–is schooled out of us (Benjamin 5). Shame festers instead. Without shared silliness, we can never fully test our belonging, and therefore, know true safety. 

“Speed Meeting” necessitates silliness from both parties. We learn to trust that the person sitting across from us will authentically meet our creativity with their own. By inhabiting alternate identities (alter egos even), we are literally committing to the practice of co-creating and inhabiting a new world. The type that can exist any moment when at least two people decide to evict the dominant imaginary that typically pervades our minds.  

Instead of “presuppos[ing] a fixed genetic or cultural predisposition that ignores the plasticity of our brains and the malleability of our social relations” (Benjamin 17), we lean into that malleability and generate original identities that shape new relations.