Sociology Flipbooks

A Flipbook is a way of displaying a pdf document online so that it has the look-and-feel of a paper-based magazine, one whose pages you can turn using a mouse (desktop) or finger (mobile). That’s it, really. I could talk about stuff like whether this creates a greater sense of engagement among students than the […]

Sociology ShortCuts: Crime, Consumption and Harm

In this ShortCut Dr Matt Follet briefly explains how consumption patterns in contemporary societies link into ideas about environmental / green crime and the concept of harm. It’s available in two flavours and while it’s usual to say that “you pays your money and you takes your choice” this would be a bit superfluous because […]

Sociology ShortCuts: Green Crime and Criminology

In this Sociology ShortCut green criminologist Dr. Gary Potter provides a brief introduction to the concepts of green crime and criminology.

Sociology ShortCuts: Primary and Secondary Green Crime

ShortCuts to Sociology is a new series of free films designed to clearly and concisely illustrate key ideas and concepts across a range of topics – from family, through deviance to sociological methods and theory. The films are: short: between 30 seconds and a couple of minutes focused on definitions, explanations and analysis framed around […]

Debating Deviance: Moral Dilemmas

One of the interesting things about the sociology of crime and deviance at a-level is that it invariably throws-up a range of what we might term “moral dilemmas” – acts that, while they might strictly and legally be called crimes, may be motivated more by an altruistic aesthetic – such as the desire to “right […]

Understanding Crime and Deviance in Postmodernity: Part 2 – Deviance as Harm

The Part 1 Workbook looked at some general criticisms of conventional (positivist) approaches to understanding crime and criminals and the Part 2 Workbook builds on this critique by outlining an alternative approach based on the concept of social harm. This contemporary approach argues we need to widen the way we see “crime” to include various […]

Some Notes on Constitutive Criminology

While the concept of a “postmodern criminology” may be somewhat nebulous, to say the least, the ideas underpinning constitutive criminology may be the closest we have. The basic idea here is to adopt what Henry and Milovanovic (1999) call a holistic approach, involving a ‘duality of blame’ that moves the debate away from thinking about […]