Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Background
After watching Kimberle Crenshaw’s Ted Talk “The Urgency of Intersectionality” and reading Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins”, this is a fun activity to explore the concept ‘intersectionality’ as a framework. This activity may feel similar to Twister given the color-based instructions.
For a class size of ~30 students, split the class into small groups where each do the following:
Use the different colors of yarn, various intersections of yarn, starting position of each volunteer, and the larger web to discuss limitations of a single frame and additive frames (i.e. you just have to look at race + gender or red + blue), then ultimately a need for a complex web or framework like intersectionality. Connect the activity of navigating the web to navigating various systems of oppression, noting the problem of simplifying such complicated systems to pieces of yarn one steps across.
- Ask students to form a circle, then ask for five volunteers to be in the middle of the circle.
- Using (3-4) different colored pieces of yarn, students who form the circle will form a complex web of yarn by tossing large balls of yarn to each other randomly for 3 minutes.
- Once the 3 minutes end, ask the circle students to drop the yarn on the ground. The five volunteers should then find a place in the web along one edge of the circle. They can share a space as they feel comfortable, though ideally the five volunteers will select different gaps in the yarn web.
- The race is on! First group to help all five volunteers cross the yarn circle/web and return to the edge wins. Each group should select one color to help the five volunteers exit the web during the following rounds:
Three Rounds
- Each volunteer can only move one space at a time based on the one color the group selected, i.e. everyone step forward, if you have a red strand before you. Some students may not be able to exit the web based on the color selected. This is a teachable limitation.
- The group may select a different color to repeat the steps in round one.
- The group should put the 3-4 colors in order, i.e. red first, blue second, green third, yellow last. Volunteers may move forward as before, but may now also move across the additional colors in order, i.e. everyone may move forward with red until they face a different color, and may only move if the next color is blue, otherwise they must wait until the other volunteers cross all the blue before them.
