"Confronting Katrina: Race, Class and Disaster in American Society"

Stanford faculty will teach a one-unit class, ``Confronting Katrina: Race, Class and Disaster in American Society,`` Larry Bobo, professor of sociology, has announced. The class, offered by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), will be open to the public free of charge.

``Like the rest of the nation, the faculty of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity was profoundly moved by the images of suffering and neglect we all witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,`` said Bobo, the CCSRE director. ``Throughout the country and here on the Stanford campus people are struggling to understand what went wrong and why.`` CCSRE faculty felt it imperative that ``Stanford should be in the forefront of informing our students and the larger community about the sorts of long-standing problems of entrenched poverty and racial inequality so much at the root of the human devastation seen in the Gulf States,`` he said.

In order for a local and national dialogue to begin, Bobo says, "we need to recreate the vocabulary for talking about the duties of government and each of us to one another that seems to have been lost over the past two to three decades. If Katrina really does push us in this direction, if it helps rekindle a dream too long deferred, then we will indeed be the better for it."

The course (CSRE 51K) will present discussions on four themes, Bobo said. ``It will also be a forum for serious discussion and probing examination of what we need to do as a nation to avoid such a calamity in the future.``

Classes will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. on four nonconsecutive Mondays from Oct. 10 to Nov. 28. All classes will be held in Room 105 in Braun Hall (Building 320) except for the Oct. 24 class, which will be held in Cubberley Auditorium.

Class themes will include:

* Oct.10 Foundations of Neglect

* Oct. 24 Media, Culture and the Politics of Representation: Viewing a Racialized Disaster

* Nov. 7 Organizations as the Solution and the Problem

* Nov. 28 Lessons from Katrina

Participating faculty will include Bobo; Lucius Barker, professor emeritus of political science; David Brady, professor of political science; Al Camarillo, professor of history; Luis Fraga, associate professor of political science; Shanto Iyengar, professor of communication; Brian Lowery, assistant professor of organizational behavior; Hazel Markus, professor of psychology; Dale Miller, professor of psychology in the Graduate School of Business; Marcy Morgan, associate professor of communication; David Palumbo-Liu, professor of comparative literature; John Rickford, professor of linguistics; Debra Satz, associate professor of philosophy; and Matt Snipp, professor of sociology.

Course information also is available online at the CCSRE website at http://ccsre.stanford.edu/EV_news.htm or by sending e-mail to ccsreinfo [at] stanford.edu.
No RSVP is required by members of the public who would like to attend class sessions.