SOSC 1350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Social Constructionism, Post-Structuralism, Social Darwinism

• School: York University
• Department: Social Science
• Course: SOSC 1350
• Professor: Reese Simpkins

Document Summary

Thinking about gender and race in sociology-legal studies. Law = racialization, gendering process - produces difference. Social construction = knowledge produced through socio-historical processes. Positivist - they understand race as: fixed (can"t be changed), socio-demographic variable, based on criminogenic properties. Critical - see race as: product of social interactions, fluid and changeable. Social darwinism (comack) survival of the first concept but for humans (popular in the early 1900s), justification for the colonialism and european superiority. Creates differences between our/canadian culture and others. We all break laws all the time, only some of us are criminalizes. Criminalization or race - criminalization = the process by which behaviours and individuals are transformed into crime and criminals. Racialisation of crime: racialization - the process through which social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differential social collectivities (comack)