What’s Deviant? Topics That Instructors Highlight in Their Deviance Course

Abstract

ABSTRACT To determine what sociologists of deviance actually teach in their course of the same name, I requested a copy of a syllabus from their instructors at roughly 600 nonrandomly chosen sociology departments in the United States and Canada; in addition, I harvested two dozen or so syllabi that instructors posted on the Internet. My sample came to 229 syllabi, again, for a nonrandom selection of deviance courses taught in North America. Instructors of the course divided into two camps: those who organize the course around generic concepts and theories that, presumably, apply with more-or-less equal force to all or most forms of deviance (a minority, 77, or 34%, took this route), and those instructors who organize the course mainly around particular types, examples, or forms of deviance (the majority, 152 or 66% of the total). Of all the deviant types, illicit drug use (129 mentions), violence (128), sexual deviancies (118), mental disorder/mental illness (96), undesirable physical characteristics (86), and white-collar crime (81) made up the top half-dozen instances of the deviancies mentioned. Judging from the topics chosen, I surmise that instructors selected their subject matter on the basis of varying criteria; a few include idealism, ideology, politics, consequentiality, commonness, known-aboutness, and their relationship with parallel topics in the field of criminology, constitute some of the most common such criteria. It is unlikely that exhortation from the field’s critics will change their minds on the matter.