MA Sociology and Criminology

at University of Essex

There can be no crime without society. Combining the specialist study of criminology with a broad approach to sociological questions, our course emboldens you to study crime, criminals, and criminal justice within wider social contexts. Understanding society is key to understand every other phenomenon within it, including crime.

How do we understand crime? How can it be prevented? Why should crime be punished, and how should we go about it? This course also allows you to apply sociological theories to criminology asking questions like these. Criminologists and sociologists engage with some of the most pressing issues, decisions and dilemmas facing societies today. On our course you explore the nature of crime, criminal justice and punishment within wider social contexts. You will also explore how society deals with the past and the present, with issues such as colonialism and post-colonialism and the future of human rights as the backbone of every analysis.

Guided by our expert staff who specialise in social theory, colonial history, terrorism, organised crime, prisons, drug abuse, and crime in the media, you explore how criminal activity interlinks with age, gender, and social concepts such as power and identity.

You will study areas including:

• Social divisions, inequality, the nature of work and commercial culture
• Culture, identity and subjectivity
• Gender and sexuality
• Media and criminology
• The analysis, politics and prevention of crime
• Globalisation and various forms of crime
• Security and the state
• New criminological theory
• Terrorism, counter-terrorism, surveillance and human rights

You explore some of the most important and significant debates in contemporary social theory, learning to think analytically about theoretical questions. You discover the importance of social theory in developing a politically engaged understanding of concepts such as post-structuralism, feminism and actor-network theory.