Hate Crime in Everyday Life
While spectacular Hate Crimes involving mass murders and indiscriminate destruction invariably grab the newspaper, tv and social media headlines, a wide range of more mundane and pedestrian forms of hate are largely ignored. These relatively low-level forms of hate – from casual bullying to wider forms of sexual or racial harassment – rarely explode into […]
Lessons In A Tube
A YouTube to be exact because this post reintroduces TheTeacherSociology Channel that I first posted about a couple of years ago in relation to their extensive range of (AQA) exam-help videos. TheTeacherSociology has recently expanded her repertoire – presumably in response to the current need for on-line teaching – to create a range of tutorials […]
ShortCuts to Sociology: free film collection
For reasons that need not detain us here I was looking at the various free films we’ve published over the past few years and thought it might be useful to gather them all together in a single post. This would enable anyone who’s interested in using them with their students – particularly, but not exclusively, […]
Crime and Gender: Closing The Gap?
The second offering in our short season of new crime films (the first provides an empirical example of Situational Crime Prevention in the form of Painter and Farrington’s Stoke-on-Trent street-lighting experiment) looks at the enduring relationship between gender and crime. This relationship, as sociologists have long-observed, is one that, both historically and cross-culturally, is dominated […]
Relighting the Streets: Situational Crime Prevention
Over the past 50 years an increasingly-influential school of criminology has argued that finding “the causes of crime” or “solutions to the problem of crime” is not possible. The best we can do, they argue, is manage and limit the extent of crime. Situational Crime Prevention, in this respect, involves a range of strategies based […]
Unmasking: The End of Debate?
Unmasking is an extreme form of criticism that, in one form or another, you’re likely to have come across on social media like Twitter. But while social media may have given Unmasking a new and possibly more-pernicious lease of life, it’s a form of criticism that, as our new film featuring Professor Peter Baehr demonstrates, […]
Gone in 60 Seconds: video explainers
Helen Barnard, currently Deputy Director of Policy and Partnerships at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has created a Vimeo Channel (an up-market version of YouTube that we like so much we have our own dedicated ShortCutstv Channel) filled with a number of very short films on and around the topics of poverty and welfare. Most of […]
Attending Church at the Turn of the (20th) Century
One of the things about teaching the sociology of religion is that, at various points – from its function and role in society to secularisation theory – you’ll find yourself referring to “religion in the past”. And if you want to anchor your observations in something slightly more-solid than an airy wave of the hand […]
One-Minute Interactionism: The Animated Version
A few months ago we posted an animated version of our One-Minute Strain Theory film and since it generally seemed to get a relatively welcoming reception we thought we’d go ahead with some further conversions of films in the “One-Minute” series. This month’s free animated offering, therefore, is a 1-Minute explanation of Labelling Theory that […]
Right Realism vs. Edgework: A Short Film
This short Crime Channel film looks at two contrasting approaches to understanding young, male, working-class criminality. The first, Right Realism, is an approach underpinned by the notion of criminals making rational choices on the basis of a “cost-benefit” analysis of crime. If, in short, the potential costs exceed the assumed benefits then a crime will […]