Relevant Research & How-to Guides
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- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
Browse Selected Films
- Durkheim and the Functions of Crime (streaming, Academic Video Online) It seems obvious to most people that crime and social order are opposites. But more than a century ago French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, suggested that it wasn't that simple. This film looks at the introduction of Zero Tolerance Policing in New York, the imprisonment of Dr Jack Kevorkian for assisting terminally-ill patients to die and the tragic murder in the UK of Jamie Bulger, to illustrate Durkheim's three key functions of crime. It concludes by looking at how the legacy of these ideas has been so influential in the development of criminology
- Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class (streaming, Academic Video Online) Class Dismissed navigates the steady stream of narrow working class representations from American television's beginnings to today's sitcoms, reality shows, police dramas, and daytime talk shows. Featuring interviews with media analysts and cultural historians, this documentary examines the patterns inherent in TV's disturbing depictions of working class people as either clowns or social deviants - stereotypical portrayals that reinforce the myth of meritocracy.
- The Purity Myth: The Virginity Movement's War on Women (streaming, Kanopy) "The virginity movement" is an unholy alliance of evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians, and conservative policy intellectuals exploiting irrational fears about women's sexuality to roll back women's rights. Includes dad-and-daughter "purity balls," taxpayer-funded abstinence-only curricula, political attacks on Planned Parenthood, and recent attempts by legislators to de-fund women's reproductive health care and narrow the legal definition of rape.
- The Last Taboo: Children Who Sexually Abuse (streaming, Academic Video Online This groundbreaking program shatters the Victorian notion of childhood innocence. It reveals that sexual abuse of children is also committed by other children
- Biology and Crime (streaming, Academic Video Online) Discusses whether or not people are born into a life of crime.
- Short Cuts: Crime and Deviance (streaming, Academic Video Online) Seven short programs that illustrate key social aspects of crime and deviance.
- Exploring Society: Deviance and Social Control series (streaming, Academic Video Online) Deviance and Social Control explains how society defines and controls deviance.
- Say brother. Social control (streaming, Academic Video Online) his program focuses on the surgical and psychotropic research being proposed (and in some cases, implemented) to curb violent tendencies via the testing of prison inmates. Host Topper Carew speaks with inmates of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk and two groups of professionals in two separate interviews.
- Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (dvd) Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky revisit the saga from their HBO's PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS - returning to West Memphis, Arkansas, to re-examine the controversial story of the notorious murder case, revealing new evidence and exploring the ironies and ambiguities of the mystery.
- The Lavender Scare (streaming, Academic Video Online) With the United States gripped in the panic of the 1950s Cold War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deems homosexuals to be “security risks” and vows to rid the federal government of all employees discovered to be gay or lesbian. Tens of thousands lose their jobs. But the mass firings have an unintended effect: they stir outrage in the gay community and thrust an unlikely hero into the forefront of the LGBTQ rights movement. In addition to illuminating a little-known chapter of
Podcasts
- Left Handed Devils: The Social Construction of Deviance (The Social Breakdown) We’re using our understanding of the three schools of sociological theory to breakdown deviance and crime this week. What is deviance? What is crime? How are they different? How does society create the definitions of what is a deviant behavior and what is a criminal act?
- Victor Rios on Policing Black and Latino Boys (Office Hours) Guest host Sarah Shannon interviews Victor Rios, professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In his recent ethnography, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Rios searches for ways that police and a culture of punishment cause boys of color to internalize fatalistic attitudes about class and race.
