Deviance, Difference & Conformity
Duration:
1 Teaching Period
Unit Code:
SOC20020
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 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
View further information on this unit.