Nutshell Studies: Alexander (2010)

The second Nutshell Study does a quick’n’dirty hack-job on Michelle Alexander’s 2010 study “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” – the idea being, as with everything in this series, “to make it easier for students to get to grips with significant classic and contemporary sociological studies in a simple, straightforward, […]

Podcasts with Pictures: Learning Academy

Another in the “Podcasts with Pictures” series designed to bring to your attention video materials you or your students might find useful. In this instance we have a series of “video lessons” created by The Learning Academy. Each of the 14 lessons lasts between 10 and 15 minutes and consists of someone talking about a […]

Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 1. Functionalism

A short set of Notes covering a range of Functionalist explanations for crime and deviance, largely based around the concepts of anomie (both the Durkheimian and Mertonian interpretations) and Strain (Merton again plus Agnew’s General Strain Theory). There’s also a little bit of subcultural stuff thrown-in for good measure. Traditional Functionalism Functionalist approaches are based […]

Ghostsites: Wathistory

WatHistory is a YouTube site I’ve been meaning to write about but, for whatever reason, never got around to doing so until now. I guess I was inspired by the sociology ghostsites theme because this site seems to have something of a chequered history. Although the Twitter account ceased trading in 2018 and the .com website may never […]

Ghostsite: The Sociology Tutor

Every so often I chance upon web sites that have been started by teachers with what seems like a shed-load of initial enthusiasm. They create and distribute lots of free resources in a relatively short space of time and then suddenly just abandon their baby before it’s had a chance to really grow. One of […]

Five Functions of Identity

A great deal of discussion about identity in a-level Sociology can be fairly abstract and concerned with the mechanics of construction: how and why, for example, particular identities are created and assumed. In the midst of all this some relatively simple questions sometimes get obscured – an idea addressed by Adams and Marshall (1996) when […]

Crime and Deviance Study Guides

The great Crime Clear-Out continues with 3 Study Guides that I probably half-inched at some point from the Queen Elizabeth High School Moodle site (which is okay because whoever put them there – along with some other crime-related bits-and-bobs – seems to have got them from Greenhead College). From what I can gather the Guides […]

Even More A-level Sociology Organisers

A little like the iconic red buses of yore, you wait a couple of years for a new batch of a-level sociology knowledge organisers and then two come along at once. Or a few days later at any rate. Bit like red buses when you come to think about it. Still, a gift horse is […]

Sociology Podcasts: Theory for 10@10

This is a set of podcasts, plus associated supporting material (such as PowerPoint Presentations that summarise key ideas and throw-in a few student activities for good measure), created by Liz Beaven and Andy Leach from Sociology Support that are being given-away for absolutely no money (although you do have to go through a fairly-painless Checkout […]

Durkheim and the Functions of Crime

We’ve been busy on the film front these past few months making a range of crime and deviance films on Hate Crime, Crime and Gender, Situational Crime Prevention and Criminal Profiling (although the latter will probably have greater appeal to psychologists than sociologists) and a final offering in what people would probably be calling a […]

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 […]

The D.O.V.E. Protocol: 4 Functions of Religion

Classical functionalist theories of religion, associated with the work of writers like Durkheim (1912), Malinowski (1926), Alpert (1937), Parsons (1937) and more-latterly Luhmann (1977), generally see religion as a cultural institution: one mainly concerned with the creation and promotion of cultural values that function to support and maintain social order.  Underpinning the notion of order, […]

More Crime and Deviance Resources

Following on from the previous set of crime resources, this is a mixed-bag of PowerPoint Presentations and Word documents covering various aspects of crime and deviance. While there is coverage of various issues and debates here, the main emphasis is on student activities and tasks – and while there’s nothing particularly spectacular or cutting-edge about […]