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Study online with Griffith University through Open Universities Australia. Explore all degrees, subjects and short courses now.

Be prepared for a future career as an innovator, communicator and creator. With our innovative majors you can tailor your degree to both your professional pursuits and your personal interests, creating a unique skill set that could help you secure your dream job.
You will gain the understanding, insight and skill to find and communicate creative solutions to important world issues. You will develop advanced writing and presentation skills as well as research and project management skills. You will also learn about societies and cultures, past and present.
You will have the option to develop specialist expertise in contemporary fields such as journalism and public relations, or more traditional fields such as sociology, history and literary studies to name some.

Develop critical thinking, writing, and research skills in demand across all industries. You can follow your passion with majors and electives that interest you. Develop connections through peer learning, networking, and work experience.

Bachelor of Arts

Popular Music, Culture and Identity

Gender, Crime and Justice

Power and Politics

Understanding the Social World

Sociology of Crime

Social Problems - (In)equality and (In)justice

Histories of Sexuality

Death, Grief and Culture

Research in Sociology

Sociology of Identity

This subject introduces the major 19th and 20th century theories of crime, their historical antecedents and ideological dimensions. Attention is given to street crime, white collar crime, and violence between intimates. Criminology is the social scientific study of crime – its causes, its effects and the manner in which societies define, understand and respond to criminal activity. In one sense or another, all societies have sought to control crime or deviance, and all cultures have explanations as to why and how people do bad or wicked things. Criminology, however, is a fairly new historical invention, its origins dating less than two hundred years. Yet even within this time, the social sciences have developed diverse and sometimes conflicting explanations, theories and approaches to understanding, explaining, and redressing crime. Psychology, political science, economics, and sociology all evidence distinct epistemological and methodological approaches to questions of what causes crime, how is crime defined, and how should we as a society respond to crime.The sociological investigation of crime overlaps in many respects with these and other disciplines. At the same time, much of criminological theory and method derives from sociology, and sociology remains one of the most central disciplines in the social study of crime. Like all social sciences, sociology is rooted in the epistemology of the scientific method. Knowledge, in this sense, comes from hypotheses that are tested and retested in order to produce theories about criminal behaviour, causality, and the efficacy of treatments or punishments. This distinction is what more immediately separates criminology from other approaches to or explanations of crime.This does not mean that the social sciences are above reproach, or that social science itself is infallible. On the contrary, as we will see, the social sciences (including sociology) have offered explanations of crime ranging from the plausible to the absurd. And although much of criminology is oriented towards a social scientific explanation of the origins and effects of crime, other branches take a more critical look at how crime itself is conceptualized, investigated and socially constructed. Yet other branches look at how people make sense of, interpret, and understand crime and social control. These three types of investigation – causal, critical, and interpretive – roughly follow three of the major paradigms in sociology, namely functionalism, social conflict, and symbolic interactionism. In the case of criminology moreover, a fourth paradigm exists that overlaps with psychology and medicine. This approach shares with functionalism the assumption of the scientific method as a means to investigate crime, but differs insofar as it looks at specific psychological or physiological traits, and not social structures, as primary causes of criminal or anti-social behaviour. Out of these four approaches two (functionalism and social conflict) are considered “macro” approaches insofar as they look at the relationship between crime and larger social structures; and two are considered “micro” approaches insofar as they look at the relationship between crime and individuals or small groups. None of these approaches are more “correct” than the others. Rather, these approaches represent different strategies in terms of the investigation of different type of questions. Some people want to know, for example, why some criminals appear to have no remorse for the harm they cause to others. Other people want to know why racial or ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the criminal justice system; why men commit more crimes than women; or how effective certain policies are in preventing or deterring crime. All are valid questions that utilize different assumptions and paradigms. Thus we may say that virtually all of the sociological study of crime is today defined by etiological questions (i.e. the investigation of the origins of causes), by critical questions (i.e. the investigation of power and social control in relation to crime), and by interpretive questions, (i.e. the concept of Verstehen, or the investigation of how people symbolically construct and make sense of their own realities). The scope and breadth of these questions is enormous, and we can only hope to cover a small part of these questions in one class.

Unpack crime using social science. You’ll broaden your understanding of criminology by incorporating factors from the past and various worldviews. Explore the origins of crimes including street crime and white-collar crime.

Despite the public&#39;s obsession with crime, victimisation and criminal justice, despite the morbid fear that crime and victimisation arouses, despite the endless volumes written to account for offending, victimisation and criminal justice processing, gender, the most powerful social factor of all has been virtually ignored by criminologists.&quot; (Leonard, 1982). This course explores the persistent and profound differences women and men&#39;s experiences of crime. The course considers how gender intersects with other social categories such as race, class, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity to shape crime and responses to it.

Seek to explain the profound differences between genders in crime rates, patterns, victimisation, and criminal justice system experiences and responses. Then consider intersections between gender, Indigeneity, class and sexual orientation.

The term social problem is usually taken to refer to social conditions that affect a significant number of people within society in a negative way. Social problems are seen as being disruptive or damaging to society, as social injustices that we should be striving to solve. For example, crime and safety, violence, alcohol, and drug use are often constructed as significant social problems for many people in Australia while others are more concerned with inequality and discrimination. In fact, social problems like crime are often the consequence of factors extending beyond the individual&#39;s control, such as inequality, discrimination, prejudice, oppression, and concomitant social injustice. Sociology provides us with the critical thinking skills to understand the connection between social problems and the social structure including how social problems come to be &#39;problems&#39; in the first place. In this course, you will develop frameworks for critical sociological thought by exploring multiple intersectional axes of power, oppression, inequality, and social injustice including classism, racism and colonialism, sexism, heterosexism and transmisia, ableism, adultism, and ageism. You will learn how oppression and power within these spheres (and the intersections between them) are vital to understanding the social problems of most concern to the discipline of criminology and reflect on how (in)justice might be mitigated. The knowledge gained will equip you with the tools to do criminology in a socially just way.

Learn about different forms of power and oppression—and how they’re linked to social problems like crime. You’ll explore sociology and practice critical thinking. Approach criminology in a socially fair way.

Please note: This subject was previously a level 1 subject with a different code (SGY130).
 &#39;Youth&#39; is a sociological construct that operates at multiple levels: an individual young person, an attitude for being in the social world, and an institution. We explore the two main branches of sociological research into the lives of young people; youth cultures and youth transitions.
You are introduced to a range of social identities (for example, sexuality, rurality), social institutions (such as education, family), and social identities (including subcultural, digital) that frame the experience of youth and draws on local, national and international examples to illustrate young people&#39;s negotiations of contemporary society.

Shine a light on youth culture at local, national and international levels. Think about how society transitions people through the stages of youth. Look at the nature of identity. Assess the role of the individual within an institution.

Sociology of Youth

This subject provides hands on experience of social research. The particular focus is the semi-structured qualitative interviews. You nominate a research topic and, with the assistance of the teaching team, draft a research plan to investigate that topic. You then undertake three semi-structured qualitative interviews and qualitative data analysis following templates and protocols provided by the research team.
Assessment involves preparation of a research plan, the submission of the first interview transcribed and with preliminary data analysis and personal reflections on the interview process, and a final research report collating the findings from the three interviews.

Discover the advantages and disadvantages of using the face-to-face interview as a research method. Select a topic to investigate and put forward a research plan. Run three qualitative interviews. Combine all your learnings in an in-depth report.

The aim of this subject is to apply critical perspectives to popular music as a key form of cultural production, consumption and leisure in contemporary everyday life. In doing so the unit will apply a range of sociological concepts and theories ranging from Marxism and cultural Marxism through to more recent post-structuralist approaches including postmodernism, reflexive modernity and risk. The unit will also draw on approaches applied to the study of popular music in corresponding disciplines such as cultural studies and media studies.

Explore how popular music has become an essential part of culture and everyday life. You’ll use sociological theories like postmodernism to understand its significance. Study popular music in depth. Get critical about the impact of music on society.

A key definition distinguishing human beings from other animals is that humans live in the knowledge of their mortality. This subject explores the human condition of death and dying as it draws from interdisciplinary research literatures and cultural objects, including film and memoir. It examines major psychological and psychoanalytic concepts of grief, mourning and melancholia as well as key themes on topics such as: death and memorialisation online; cross-cultural death rites and beliefs; the politics of mourning; legal issues and the politics of euthanasia; dark tourism; death and memoir; death and celebrity culture; death denial and taboo; death and representation; love and death.

Analyse how humans deal with death and incorporate mourning into our cultures. Reassess the rituals of grief. Probe the politics of euthanasia. Explore the social function of the cemetery. Track the ways that the internet has affected how we mourn.

Discover the main sociological theories of identity. You will explore contemporary debates surrounding identity through various sites used for the generation of social identities, for example, consumption, sexuality, class and gender. Through your studies, you will also explore the different ways in which contemporary social conditions, for example, the internet, consumption, globalisation, global warming and terrorism, and social categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, religion and social class variously structure identity possibilities.

Peel away the layers that form modern conceptions of identity. Unpack social categories like ethnicity, religion and class. Address the impact of globalisation and the internet. Realise how social conditioning can impact the formation of identity.

This is a subject designed to help you understand the meaning of political power and empower you politically. If you are one of those people who say, &quot;I&#39;m not into politics&quot;,Â this subject willÂ help you change your mind. You will be alerted to how the words, issues and activities of politicians and those who are in government have meaning and relevance to you and your life, and the lives of the people around you. Politics is not separable from the world that you and your family live in and the study of political power will help you to see and understand how politics penetrates every aspect of your life. This is because politics is about the exercise of power - Who has it? Who wants it? Who deserves it? And most importantly - who misses out? We are all into politics even if we do not know it because we have no choice. But the more we know the more we can all benefit (individually and collectively) because learning how politics works and learning about the political skills necessary to negotiate power relations is one of the greatest insights our university education can give us. We look at the politics of class, crisis, culture, the military and violence, and what the meaning of citizenship in a transnational world really is?

Pick apart the relationship between politics and power. Build an appreciation for how politics impacts class, culture and the military. Unpack political trends and history. Gain insight into who benefits from political power and who misses out.

This subject was previously known as Introduction to Sociology.This subject introduces students to the social sciences in a fresh local context, both in terms of the theories social scientists use to explain Australian society and the way in which those theories have an impact on social life.Note: This subject is considered to be academically equivalent to CCJ108 Social Problems - (In)equality and (In)justice and CCJ18 Crime and Society.

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