Glocalisation and Crime

Course in the Module "Sociology of Crime and Deviance" (3 ECTS)

Gema Varona, University of the Basque Country

AIMS

- To discuss the meaning and expressions of glocalisation in terms of social control, crime, criminalisation, penalty and criminology.

- To define the internal and international boundaries between criminal policy and politics.

- To discuss the recent changes in punitive populism, symbolic and promotional criminal law: its atmosphere and stakeholders at different territorial levels, including cyberspace.

- To think about the potential of penal abolitionism as a glocalised movement.

METHODOLOGY

To get a more profound understanding of those issues and their implications, all participants in the course are invited to a learning process that promotes the integration of experiential and academic knowledge where the student is the main interactive actor finding the connection with other courses, participants’ ideas and lines of reasoning. Beyond a mere transfer of data, this course aims at offering a grounded and open debate on basic socio-legal and criminological concepts, understood as keys or guide to enter into the complexities of criminal policy, in order to open perspectives in a critical way. With that objective in mind, participatory strategies will be proposed and co-constructed in class to learn to look, to see, to observe, to think and to talk about criminal policy transcending public alarm and political manipulation in what has been called post-truth in global societies. To achieve this, common readings are proposed to be commented in class. Finally, dynamic and collective formats of evaluation, such as elaborating podcasts or blogs, perhaps with case studies, will be encouraged.