Media Representations: UK TV Tropes

The concept of a “media trope” refers to the recurrent use of particular ideas, themes and the like within (and sometimes across) different media and while tropes are often simple stylistic devices used to convey necessary information to an audience in a short space of time (Hollywood films, for example, use various recurring devices to […]

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 […]

Understanding Crime and Deviance in Postmodernity: Part 1

Although the concept of a “postmodern criminology” is, for various reasons, highly problematic this doesn’t mean that newer approaches to understanding and explaining crime don’t have something to offer the a-level sociologist. In this two-part extravaganza, therefore, we can look at two (yes, really) dimensions to this criminological shift through the medium of a couple […]

Really Simple Series: Five-Minute Feedback Form

Getting feedback from students can help you: Check student understanding at an individual level. Reflect on your teaching in terms of how lesson content is conveyed and understood. But it can also have practical and theoretical drawbacks: • In terms of the former, for example, it can be time-consuming to create and interpret. • In […]

Methods in Context: Crime and Official Statistics

While the validity of Official Crime Statistics has long been questioned, their reliability has tended to be assumed. Recent pronouncements by the ONS, however, suggest that students should look at the reliability of crime statistics more critically…

“It’s just banter”: Applying Matza’s “techniques of neutralisation” to ‪#‎everydaysexism‬

Although Matza’s ideas about “Delinquency and Drift” are 50 years old, this doesn’t mean they can’t be applied to contemporary examples in the A-level classroom – as this video with its examples of “Misogyny in British universities” probably attests. This kind of material also illustrates two further ideas that are worth exploring: a. The rarity […]

The Functions of Crime

  This PowerPoint file combines text, graphics, audio and video to outline four types of Functionalist theory on crime and deviance: Durkheimian, Strain (Merton), General Strain Subcultural. A self-selected, unrepresentative of anyone-but-themselves, sample of reviewers have described this resource as: “Brilliant”; “Utterly amazing” and “Too complicated to follow”. Is this, as Meatloaf so perceptively once asserted, […]

Introducing Sociology: Video as a visual dimension for teaching about norms

If you want to add a visual dimension to your students’ understanding of norms the Can of Worms YouTube Channel has a selection of short films you can use as illustrative material. There are quite a few films from which to choose, so it probably pays to be selective. The focus, as ever, is on […]

Beyond Milgram: Obedience and Identity

In the early 1960s two apparently-unrelated events, separated by thousands of miles, took place that, in their own way, shocked the world. The first, in early 1961, was the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann. He was accused – and subsequently convicted – of being one of the organisers of the Nazi Concentration Camps in which […]

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 […]