The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Stanford University is offering a one-unit class, “Confronting Katrina: Race, Class and Disaster in American Society.” Taught by Stanford faculty, the class is free and open to the public.

“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 Larry Bobo, CCSRE director and Stanford professor of sociology. “Throughout the country and here on the Stanford campus people are struggling to understand what went wrong and why.”

CCSRE faculty wanted Stanford to “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,” Bobo said.

The course will be a forum for discussion and examination of what we need to do as a nation to avoid such a calamity in the future, he said.

Classes will be held 7 - 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) on the Stanford campus, except for the Oct. 24 class, which will be held in Cubberley Auditorium.

Specific topics include “Foundations of Neglect,” Oct. 10; “Media, Culture and the Politics of Representation: Viewing a Racialized Disaster,” Oct. 24; “Organizations as the Solution and the Problem,” Nov. 7; and “Lessons from Katrina,” Nov. 28.

Participating faculty are 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.

For more course information, visit ccsre.stanford.edu or e-mail ccsreinfo@stanford.edu. No RSVP is required from members of the public who would like to attend class sessions.