Psychology ShortCuts: Offender Profiling

As with its sociological sister, ShortCuts to Psychology 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 psychological theory and methods. The films are: short: between 30 seconds and a couple of minutes focused on definitions, explanations and […]

SCTV Weekly Round-Up

A little late, but worth the wait. Probably. Our weekly round-up of the sites and stories that are hot. Or not.

Weekly Round-Up

This week’s round-up of all the sites, scenes and sounds that piqued our interest…

Weekly Digest

All the links that caught our eye this past week in one handy post… Sociology Education Methods in Context Mark Scheme I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t look good: “I Teach At A For-Profit College: 5 Ridiculous Realities” Crime Manchester’s Heroin Haters – Vigilante violence? Revealed: London’s new violent crime hotspots Chief Constable confirms […]

The Crime and Deviance Channel

The Channel is a collection of original resources – Text, PowerPoint, Audio and Video – designed to complement the teaching of crime and deviance. It’s been running since 2010 and we’ve recently decided to give it a complete redesign, partly because the old design was getting a bit long-in-the-tooth and partly because hardware and browser […]

Crime, Deviance and Labelling

This is a short discussion piece about Labelling (and Labelling Theory) based on the following Guardian article: Smash the mafia elite: we should treat offshore wealth as terrorist finance Aside from the issues it raises about globalisation, social class and social inequality, this article is also useful as a contemporary example of labelling theory. How, […]

White-collar Crime PowerPoint

In my various travels around the web I pick-up bits-and-pieces that I think might be useful and this PowerPoint presentation on White-Collar Crime is one such piece. I don’t know who produced it (the meta data gave “IT Support” as the author, which wasn’t much use) and it seems to be one of a pair […]

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 […]

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 […]

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…

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 […]

Now That’s Magic Too! The Structure / Action Debate

Not to leave sociologists out of the equation, Olson et.al’s. research (Influencing choice without awareness, 2015) that looks at the tricks used by magicians to influence the choices made by their audience can also be used to illustrate the structure / action debate for students. Just as the magician uses a variety of techniques to […]

Crime and Deviance Channel

Updated the 2 hours+ of video on the Channel to a higher resolution (which means less pixilation when playing at larger sizes).

Institutional Racism?

It’s always useful to have a range of examples – especially contemporary examples – to hand when / if you need to illustrate a particular idea, theory or concept. And in the context of Institutional Racism, this Report by the Institute of Race Relations that has uncovered the fact that in terms of the 500+ […]