Deviance, Difference & Conformity

About this unit

This unit aims to:

• Acquaint students with a range of sociological approaches to ‘deviance’
• Equip students in how to use these approaches and to familiarise them with a number of contemporary social problems and controversies over social control
• Develop students’ understanding of the ways in which individuals and their actions are defined as socially unacceptable
• Analyse major forms of social control – in particular the legal system and social responses to crime and punishment – in addition to analysing the forces that construct notions of social conformity
• Familiarise and respond to differential power structures and the relativity of crime and criminal behaviour
• Demonstrate the ways in which sociological insights can inform policy formulation and social
  engagement in these area.

Content

• Traditional sociological explanations of deviance
• Sociological evolution of deviance
• Rules and the normative dimension: ‘kinds of people’; ‘kinds of rules’, notions of difference
• The modern context: the death of deviance
• Surveillance: Foucault and the postmodern world of post-deviance
• Feminism and deviance
• Law and deviance
• Crime, punishment and deviance
• Bodies and deviance
• Sex, sexuality, gender and deviance
• Minds and deviance
• Institutions: the church and the state and deviance

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