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Abstract:

In the 1940s, scientists in St. Paul found a way to mass-produce the strongest chemical bond on earth, one that lasts “forever.” Less than fifty years later, this compound would be in the blood of every human on the planet. Today, the East Metro of St. Paul is home to the largest and oldest plumes of forever chemicals in the world, with devastating effects for the residents and environment. How do we tell the story of an environmental catastrophe of this scale? This talk grapples with this question through a discussion of a documentary feature film in production, Forever and Forever and Forever. Moving beyond familiar stories of corporate villains and their victims, this talk explores how documentary storytelling can open up space for reflection about the embodied experience of forever chemical contamination across space and time. By framing the forever chemical crisis through legacies of settler colonialism, the film experiments with the cinematic representation of the chemical and cultural bonds that made forever chemicals, while at the same time opening space for hope and healing.

Bio:

Morgan Adamson works at the intersections of non-fiction film and cultural studies. Grounded in archival research and collaboration, her practice animates hidden histories and infrastructures as a form of social engagement situated in place. Her recent award-winning documentary, Brutal Utopias (2023), explores the struggle to define social utopia through architecture and is currently streaming nationally through the Minnesota Experience program on PBS. She is the author of a book on political cinema, Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema, in addition to numerous scholarly and popular essays. She is Professor and Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College.

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Hmong Folktales - a Macalester and UMN Collaboration

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Hmong Folktales - a Macalester and UMN Collaboration

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Dab Neeg Hmoob – Luam tawm zaum ob – Minnesota Hmong Myths, Legends, and Folktales

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Read "Enduring Images..." via the Mac Library

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Read "Enduring Images..." via the Mac Library

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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FYC MCST 194: "A Land-based Liberal Arts" co-taught by JG Everest (music composer and director), Krista Langberg (dance professor and somatic educator) and John Kim (Media and Cultural Studies professor)

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FYC MCST 194: "A Land-based Liberal Arts" co-taught by JG Everest (music composer and director), Krista Langberg (dance professor and somatic educator) and John Kim (Media and Cultural Studies professor)

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What is the role of a liberal arts education in addressing today’s challenges and tomorrow’s uncertainties? How do the liberal arts provide students with the thinking skills and tools to address them? What does it mean to be a college student today?

These are clearly big, complex questions, and this course takes a specific route through them. We will explore the liberal arts as an integrative interdisciplinary education on and about the land by learning from Macalester’s Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area, a 300-acre site on the banks of the Mississippi River. We will make multiple trips to Ordway to engage experientially with the site as a place for reflection, study and creative exploration, where we will develop collaborative projects that encourage us to examine and develop our own connections and entanglements with the land and with nature.

The class will attend to the role of the arts in a liberal arts education. We understand this in a few different ways: the arts can support a transformation of life. A land-based arts education seeks to imagine and transform the world into one in which humans, non-humans, and nature can thrive. In this sense, the arts can be in defense of nature of which we are a part. In addition, this interdisciplinary course will invite professors from across departments to teach us about varying ways to understand our relationship to the land. For example, we may draw on regional histories of colonization, ecologies of the Upper Midwest, critical media theories on digital disconnection and separation, the neuroscience of sound, increasing awareness through movement, along with other fields. In its capacity to foster discoveries, reveal neglected perspectives, and nurture creative problem solving, we will explore an expanded sense of art’s role in translating and making public these ideas.

The course is co-taught by a music composer and director (JG Everest), dance professor and somatic educator (Krista Langberg) and Media and Cultural Studies professor (John Kim), who each have extensive experience in land-based arts education. Please be advised that this class will make about 4-5 required Saturday lab trips to the Ordway Study Area and other off campus locations throughout the semester. These labs will either be full or half day afternoon excursions. Please consider taking another FYC if you expect to have a conflict.

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Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing, and Liberation

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Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing, and Liberation

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Decolonizing Bodies offers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of…

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Access "Decolonizing Bodies..." via the Mac Library

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Access "Decolonizing Bodies..." via the Mac Library

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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How to Tell An African Story by Africa No Filter

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How to Tell An African Story by Africa No Filter

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Thaum Hluas Txog Hnub Laus: When the Days of Youth are Gone (Bee Yang, 2014)

This is an album of Hmong song poetry, kwv txhiaj hmoob, composed and sung by Bee Yang, Kao Kalia Yang's father. The album notes and English translation of one of the songs are by Kao Kalia Yang.

Kwv txhiaj is, in the words of Ralph Ellison on the American Blues, "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-cosmic lyricism. As a form, the blues [and kwv txhiaj] is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."

NOTE: The duration of the songs do not reflect the actual song length. Please consider ordering the CD for the full songs. Thank you.

*This CD is available for purchase for $15. Click below to order:

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Kao Kalia Yang - Author, Public Speaker, and Teacher

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Thaum Hluas Txog Hnub Laus: When the Days of Youth are Gone (Bee Yang, 2014) This is an album of Hmong song poetry, kwv txhiaj hmoob, composed and sung by Bee Yang, Kao Kalia Yang's father. The album notes and English translation of one of the songs are by Kao Kalia Yang.

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The Impossible Happens Everyday in the Life of the Refugee

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The Impossible Happens Everyday in the Life of the Refugee

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The impossible happens every day in the life of the refugee | Kao Kalia Yang | TEDxMinneapolis

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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Community bonding and learning through Human Library - The Mac Weekly

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On the afternoon of Feb. 27, about 50 students, faculty and staff gathered in the Harmon Room in the DeWitt Wallace Library, reading intently. What they read were not typical books, but “human books.” The Human Library concept was first initiated in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2000. It aims to eliminate prejudice and find a new…

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Mac community members take action and implement ideas, with support from college donors.

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ISLAND OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS | Official Trailer HD

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The first ever narrative practice and film workshop was held in our backyard and attended by 4 fabulous film maker friends. Since then it has grown in beautiful home grown ways, shared from one to another. This has meant, every time I meet someone new, there are prior and often multiple relationships that surround us. This has offered a community of care around practice that has held the spirit of co-design and collaboration. I come to this Patreon project to continue in this way. Come along if you'd like to experience some crafted questions, exercises & fragments to accompany you in your practice...however you define it.

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Poh is a Chinese Malaysian Australian woman who comes to her practice through multiple experiences and relationships as a narrative therapy practitioner, social worker, co-researcher of trauma/displacement, writer, teacher, film protagonist and creative consultant.

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Festival of Belonging, August and September 2025

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Festival of Belonging, August and September 2025

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The Festival of Belonging is the culminating project of composer JG Everest’s yearlong MNPAiR Artist Residency at Wild River State Park, on the St Croix River, near Tayor’s Falls, MN. It will take place over four weekends in late August and mid-September 2025, and will feature a wide variety of site-specific performance installations at various areas of the park, each weekend featuring a different lineup of music, dance, storytelling, and nature walks and presentations for park visitors. SCROLL DOWN FOR FESTIVAL SCHEDULE and MORE INFO!

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The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University

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SWAPNŌ JHNĀP: DREAM JUMPING faces the ongoing chaos and escalating destruction of our Common Life by bringing connectivity and liberation out of the dream world and into reality. As the dancers travel through portals that cross time cycles and spacescapes, they integrate vital medicine and patchwork a methodology of dreaming that literally brings the desired world closer. We discover wisdom and connectivities inside the depths of oceanic grief, in the shared rhythms of a dance club, in the hatching of mythical creatures, in the rubble of war-torn landscapes, and inside quantum entanglements of movement and breath. Dancing together opens portals to the future, drawing on the feminist spiritual practice of quantum jumping. 5 journeys, 5 portals, and 5 medicines birth the miracle of a deeply connected universe. Conceived and choreographed by Ananya Chatterjea, featuring the work of dramaturg/writer Dr. Nia O. Witherspoon (INYOSI Sebenzekhaya), composer Greg Schutte, stage director k.t. shorb, scenic designer Mina Kinukawa, costume designer Annie Cady, and lighting designer Kevin Jones. Ananya Dance Theatre ensemble: Mariadela Belle Alvarez, Noelle Awadallah, Heaven Sha'Rae Calvert, Lizzette Chapa, Ananya Chatterjea, Kealoha Ferreira, Davente Gilreath, Juliet Irving, Zhané Jackson, Vy Nguyen.

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Ananya Dance Theatre Presents - Swapnō Jhnāp: Dream Jumping | The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University

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The approximate run time of the event is 90 minutes with no intermission. The Friday evening performance will be ASL Interpreted. SWAPNŌ JHNĀP: DREAM JUMPING faces the ongoing chaos and escalating destruction of our Common Life by bringing connectivity and liberation out of the dream world and into reality.

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Weaving Abundance is a multi-site participatory public art project. It invites all people into a creative journey of interconnectedness — with land, with species and with one another. Through the meditative act of weaving, many hands come together to imagine and affirm abundance – not as excess, but as enough-ness, as belonging, as wholeness.

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Where the Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

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Where the Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

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Used with the permission of Kao Kalia Yang

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This powerful memoir about a Hmong family’s epic journey to safety is a profound “testament to the miraculous strength of women and the indomitable…

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Find "Where Rivers Part..." in the Mac Library

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Find "Where Rivers Part..." in the Mac Library

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Where rivers part : a story of my mother’s life | Macalester College

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Creative NonfictionFinalist for the Chautauqua Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN USA Literary…

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The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

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The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

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A memoir by Kao Kalia Yang January 1, 2017 * 6 x 9 * 312 pages * 978-1-56689-478-4 One Hmong family's harrowing escape from war in Laos to the uncertainty of a new home as refugees in Minnesota.

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Below is a curated collection of guides, worksheets, webinars and trainings offered as a resource for the field of narrative change practitioners. While Narrative Initiative created some of these resources, others are generated by our partners. If you're new to the idea of narrative change, check out our where to start section below. This collection is evolving and we will add to it as we are able.

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Narrative Strategies Resource Library, Worksheets, & Guides

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Explore narrative strategies with guides, worksheets & webinars. A curated library for practitioners to advance narrative change effectively.

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Find "The Late Homecomer" in the Mac Library

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Find "The Late Homecomer" in the Mac Library

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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Access "Decolonizing Bodies" via the Mac Library

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Access "Decolonizing Bodies" via the Mac Library

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.