Unit code: SOC20020
Duration: 1 Teaching Period
Contact hours: Recommended 10 hours of study per week
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 familiarize 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 analyzing the forces that construct notions of social conformity
- Familiarize 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
This unit is found in the following courses:
- Bachelor of Social Science With a Major in Criminology
- Bachelor of Social Science With a Major in Behavioural Studies
View further information on this unit.
Undergraduate