Working with Hurricane Katrina evacuees will be a course requirement for some students next semester.Students who enroll this spring in Social Change in American Communities: Memory and Cultural Production in the Mississippi Delta (SOC 156A) with Profs. Mark Auslander (ANTH) and David Cunningham (SOC) will travel to the Mississippi Delta to work with evacuees and study the poor communities of Louisiana and Mississippi firsthand.

"We'll be working with evacuees ... in an academic context to make a difference," Auslander said.

The professors plan to focus on the social and racial inequalities of the region and use the aftermath of Katrina as a model.

"The costs of the disaster have been disproportionately shouldered by poorer and predominantly African-American residents," Cunningham wrote in an e-mail to the Justice.

All travel expenses will be covered by the Theodore and Jane Norman fund for faculty scholarship, he said, and a brief application for interested students will be available later this month.

The Mississippi Delta has been an intellectual focus for the Sustainable International Development program at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management for the last several years, Prof. Susan Holcombe (Heller) said.

"Hurricane Katrina also holds many important opportunities for learning about the many failures of social policy and the lack of capacity of many agencies," Director of the SID Program Laurence Simon said.

Prof. L.C. Dorsey, a leading civil rights advocate in the Mississippi Delta and the associate director of the Delta Research and Cultural Institute at Mississippi Valley State University, will teach a course on social movements this spring.

Dorsey will arrive in mid to late October, Holcombe said.

Prof. John Green, the faculty associate for the Institute for Community Based Research at Delta State University, has invited SID students to join his class on a trip looking at community development and rebuilding efforts in impoverished centers of Louisiana and Mississippi, she said.

Brandeis students can "show them [that] people around the world really care about what they're doing," Holcombe said.



Teach-in

A faculty committee has formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to coordinate a community-wide teach-in to examine issues raised by the disaster.

Scheduled for Sept. 26, "Understanding the Post Katrina Crisis" will include a multi-disciplinary panel of speakers and small group discussions on the racial and social inequalities in the Gulf Coast. Panelists will also address the social and ecological repercussions of Katrina and an analysis of the future of New Orleans.

"Faculty and students alike would like to talk about [the issues] in a way that we can use the intellectual training [that we have] to develop a perspective for the future," Auslander said.

By applying Brandeis' value of social consciousness, Holcombe said the program will engage students in discussions on the steps our nation can take to reduce the social and racial injustices taking place in New Orleans.

"Because we're privileged to be in a university, how can we use our expertise and our knowledge to apply to the real world?" she said explaining the motivation for the proposed program.

The panel will be moderated by Prof. Anita Hill (Heller) and will include Prof. Attila Klein (BIO), Prof. Jacqueline Jones (HIST), Prof. Mingus Mapps (AAAS), Prof. Robert Reich (Heller), Prof. Pam Cytrynbaum (JOUR) and Prof. Michael Doonan (Heller). Brandeis Chaplain Rabbi Allan Lehmann and Minor Sinclair, the director of Oxfam America, will also speak.