Macalester hosted its 32nd annual International Roundtable (IRT) from Oct. 22-24, exploring this year’s theme of “Stories and Sanctuary Across Disciplines and Other Divides: Belonging and Bridging in Times of Rupture.”
Organized by the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship (KAIGC), the IRT featured a keynote address on Oct. 22, a panel and Human Library event on Oct. 23 and a story circle workshop on the Oct. 24, as well as student-led sessions across the three days.
According to the KAIGC website, the goal of IRT is “exploring critical issues from a variety of perspectives.” For the event each year, the college “invites speakers, academics, practitioners, community members and performers to offer their work and experiences to galvanize student engagement and prompt global thinking.”
This year’s keynote speaker was Kao Kalia Yang, a Hmong Minnesotan author and public speaker who tied her experiences growing up in a refugee camp to how she became a storyteller working to prop up the voices of historically-marginalized communities.
At the keynote address, dean of the KAIGC Hui Wilcox, college President Suzanne Rivera and Calla Lee ’26 gave opening remarks, thanking the multiple departments that came together to make the 2025 IRT happen and urging the audience members to approach the talk with appreciation for the stories carried by those around them and for the role of the IRT as a Macalester tradition.
Yang began her keynote by thanking the Macalester community for the opportunity to speak. “When the invitation came, I knew I would say yes,” she said.
Yang was born in an isolated refugee camp in Thailand and attended school in Minnesota after immigrating to the United States. She went on to graduate from Carleton College and has since become a prolific storyteller and winner of four Minnesota Book Awards.
“The hardest thing for me to learn was that I am worth more than one chance,” Yang said.
She read aloud from her 2024 children’s book, “The Rock in My Throat,” a true story about growing up as a selective mute, too afraid to attempt speaking her non-native language of English at school. The experience told in the book is a stark difference to what became her path as a storyteller.
Yang next read from “Where Rivers Part,” a memoir told from her mother’s perspective. Between reading excerpts from the book, Yang reiterated that narratives such as her mother’s, not newspapers nor history books, tell the stories of families torn by death and migration.
“Each and every one of us matters to history,” Yang said.
The second of the IRT’s core sessions, a roundtable panel, took place on Oct. 23. Faculty associate dean of the KAIGC Khaldoun Samman welcomed the audience and thanked the IRT organizing committee for their work, followed by Provost Lisa Anderson-Levy, who gave welcoming remarks and introduced the panel’s moderator Joëlle Vitiello, a professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies.
The panelists were Bayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian-born public intellectual who was last year’s keynote speaker and serves Humphrey Distinguished Professor at Macalester, Morgan Adamson, a documentary filmmaker and chair of Media and Cultural Studies who is currently working on a storytelling project on toxicity and forever chemicals, and Yang.
On the topic of sanctuary in storytelling, Akomolafe provided a story of an interaction between him and his daughter, a published author at only 12 years old. When sharing a draft of her second book, he immediately noticed that it was written by ChatGPT. Inspired by Yang’s stories of finding her voice, he insisted to his daughter that she should “treat the moment as a ceremony” and put her own voice on the pages. Adamson followed up the anecdote by saying you should tell stories from the places you inhabit, for there is richness in the world around us.
As part of IRT, the Center for Student Leadership and Engagement hosted its annual Human Library event, featuring storytellers from the Macalester community.
“The Human Library celebrates diversity, promotes leadership and challenges preconceived notions,” Sylas Smith ’28 said. “It’s a chance for our community to connect through meaningful one-on-one conversations with people who have watched fascinating paths. Today’s event explores how history, stories, personal, cultural or disciplinary, can both bridge and divide in times of rupture, and how storytelling itself can create sanctuary and belonging across divides.”
Two members of the faculty, five students and three staff shared stories in two small-group sessions, detailing their unique experiences across fields of censorship, gender and internationalism.
Student voices were also featured across ten student-led panel sessions, featuring a wide range of topics, perspectives and practices.
“How we tell our stories matter,” Wilcox wrote in an email to The Mac Weekly. “Thanks to the creativity and thoughtfulness of the student presenters, our experience in Davis Court over the three days of IRT included engaging with community partners, a mini museum visit, story listening in small circles, learning how to dance, sharing rituals of greetings and tea and playing embodied games.”
Maddie Salunga ’27 led a student panel titled “Guayusa upina: Storytelling as Ritual in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” The chairs, arranged in a circle, mimicked a guayusa upina, a community-wide ritual and practice of storytelling. Panel participants drank guayusa tea and watched a video presentation by Salunga featuring a guayusa upina in the Kichwa community of Mushullakta, Ecuador with whom she spent the summer.
Salunga discussed the challenge of representing narratives as an “extractive process,” and wanting her film to be as authentic to the Guayusa upina as possible. Her reflection and sentiment of the practice of storytelling and the production of narratives was shared by the many involved in IRT.
“The presenters and participants of this year’s IRT co-created a space of unlearning and re-storying, where we questioned the dominant modes of knowing and being,” Wilcox wrote, “and where we began seeding new stories and new ways of witnessing each other’s stories.”
Yoni Conn contributed to the reporting for this story.
