Sociological Santa
For all those teaching and learning crime and deviance, a Sociological Santa joke I found on Twitter… And as an added bonus, another Foucault “joke”…
Learning Tables: Crime and Deviance
We’ve just started filming for a new series of crime and deviance films (the long-awaited follow-up volume to our original Shortcuts to Crime and Deviance films – a welcome change to be creating sociology films after 3 years spent focusing on psychology films – and in the process of searching for Robert Agnew pics (one […]
Visual Sociology: Picturing Inequality
As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of using graphic material (pictures and illustrations rather than examples of extreme physical violence) to both illustrate sociological ideas and encourage students to think a little more deeply about such ideas and how they can be applied to increase their depth of sociological […]
Popular Panics and the New Right
Following the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, widespread rioting broke out during August 2011 in London and many other English cities. If you don’t remember or aren’t familiar with the civil unrest, the BBC has a handy timeline of events. I recently came across an Economist article, written at the time and addressing […]
22 | Health: Part 3
The third chapter in this series looks at the social construction of mental illness and disability in terms of how definitions and meanings have changed over time and between cultures. In terms of definitions the chapter examines three basic models of mental illness the Biomedical, Psychological and Sociological (a distinction you can explore further through […]
14 | Youth: Part 3
One area of social life in which the relationship between youth and specific types of behaviour is particularly clear is that of offending behaviour. Young people – principally young, working class, men – are hugely over-represented in the crime statistics and since this series of chapters is linked by ideas about Youth Culture and Subculture […]
Crime and Criminology: Offender Profiling
The final WJEC Criminology PowerPoint provides an overview of offender profiling covering things like: • Evidence and the crime scene • British and American approaches to profiling • Examples of profiling successes and failures • A Scenario that requires students to both apply any psychological theory with which they are familiar to the crime depicted […]
Measuring Crime
This large (30-odd slide) PowerPoint Presentation was (I’m guessing) put together by Dave Bown as part of the WJEC textbook project (I think he wrote / co-wrote the online A2 eBook). It’s an interesting and wide-ranging resource that introduces a number of different topics related to the practice and problem of measuring crime. These include: […]
Crime and Criminology PowerPoint 4
The fourth WJEC Criminology PowerPoint offering provides an overview of feminist approaches to crime and criminality and, as you might expect, follows the format of the previous Presentations in this series: • brief Introductory and summary Notes • discussion questions • short activities • suggestions for further personal / independent research • a “scenario” exercise […]
Crime and Criminology PowerPoint 3
The third WJEC Criminology offering – again I’m thinking it’s by Janis Griffiths – focuses on Sociological theories of criminality and serves as a brief introduction to: • Marxism, • Functionalism, • Interactionism and • Realism. The main content here is basically a one-screen summary of key points so it’s probably best seen as a […]
Crime and Criminology PowerPoint 2
The second WJEC Criminology offering – I’m taking an educated guess that it’s by Janis Griffiths – focuses on Individualistic theories of criminality and, in particular, the assumption that criminal behaviour is related to particular types of criminal personality. This is illustrated by short Notes on three different theories and their major proponents: 1. Eysenck […]
Crime and Criminology PowerPoint 1
It’s probably fair to say that over the years attempts by different UK Exam Boards to provide teaching and learning materials for Sociology have, in the main, been somewhat half-hearted. The general position seems to be that while this new Internet-thingy confers a range of opportunities to provide teachers with information and guidance, providing teaching […]
Situational Crime Prevention: The (New Right) Theory
In two previous posts (Categorising Situational Crime Prevention Strategies and Categorising Situational Crime Prevention: Techniques and Examples) we looked at some examples of situational crime prevention strategies and techniques and this third post examines the theoretical background to situational crime prevention in a couple of ways: Firstly, by looking at the broad background in terms of […]
SCP and the Craving for Hot Products
An important dimension of Routine Activities Theory is the element of target suitability and selection. Even in situations where a motivated offender is somewhere that lacks active guardians, how and why they select one target rather than another is an important question in relation to situational crime prevention. This was directly addressed by Felson and […]
Visualising Routine Activities Theory
Routine Activities Theory has been described (by me, just now) as one of the key theoretical contributions to the development of Situational Crime Prevention strategies and techniques. In broad terms it sees crime as the outcome of both “opportunity” (Mayhew, 1976; Clarke, 1988) and “routine activities” (Cohen and Felson 1979) and represents, for Felson and […]