Winter 2017 – CRCJ 4002 C
Special Topic in Criminology
Wednesdays, 2:35 – 5:25pm
Instructor Holly Thomas
Applied Criminology: Seeking Solutions to Emerging Crimes in Global/Digital Society
Congratulations, you’re almost finished your degree! Now, what are you going to do with all of this knowledge about criminology and the criminal justice system in Canada and beyond? How can you ease your transition from this degree to grad school, law school, or the workforce? This class will allow you to apply the theoretical and practical skill sets you have developed throughout this program to work toward engaged solutions for the complex crimes affecting Canadian and Global society today. Throughout the semester, we will attempt to better understand crimes that evolve and thrive in digital and global society as a substantive topic. Examining these specific crimes from a social problems perspective will allows us to better understand crime in a holistic way that cuts across disciplinary and social boundaries.
Throughout the semester, we will engage in Problem Based Learning. This approach to both teaching and learning empowers students to take a much more active role in their education and project design. It is an active learning approach that allows students to direct the course of their own learning while still benefitting from instruction and seminar-style classroom time. Your main evaluation (a semester-long endeavor) will be a group-based, staged research project that requires you to learn (and share) both theoretical knowledge and practical skills, while solving real world problems. This approach will help you conceptualize, develop, and conduct a term research project that examines both causes and possible solutions for an emerging criminological issue of your choosing. If you’re looking for a class that lets you develop hands-on skills for policy work, professional and graduate programs, a class that moves beyond the traditional term paper and lecture-based learning, or a class that allows you to work more independently without having to write a thesis, this is the class for you.