Life Course Criminology

Catalog description

This seminar involves application of the life course paradigm to the study of crime and deviance. This involves reading articles and books that address the temporal dimension of human lives within context. The first section of the course will review the principles of life course research and consider how this theoretical orientation has been applied to explanations of criminal and deviant behavior. The second section of the course focuses on some of the key concepts in life course studies: stages, transitions, trajectories, pathways, turning points, and linked lives, and then address how these concepts are used in criminology. The final section of the course identifies historical, inter- and intra-societal variation in life course experiences, as well as the macro and micro forces that structure movement through the life course.