This table is a version of a revised proforma we have developed for the toolkit specification document (the full version for our developer is also in the wiki). We would like to work with you on ‘mapping’ out the ‘exemplary module’, focusing on description and core content. It is a work in progress and might not suit all cases, but hopefully it gives you an idea of how this ‘mapping’ framework might extract information from your module handbook and weekly materials (depending on your format, this might not apply equally in all cases). These columns will broadly translate into the online version of this tool.
We would welcome your contribution in working through this map with your chosen module (the same module as the basis for the case study). Again it is a work in progress and we see this as a draft version with some further iteration, particularly around pedagogic vocab.As you work thought this we would welcome any comments; is the proposed structure easy to use? Is it going to be useful for you in describing your module(s) to make them easier to share? Please use the space below to add your comments, suggestions. For example, is it useful to separate learning outcomes from relation to subject benchmarks?
Element / Field menu content / Sample content
General description
a. Module title / Free text / State Crime
b. Description / Free text / Until recently, it had been argued that there was a general failure among criminologists to say much about the notion of ‘state crimes’, with the emphasis focusing more sharply on the crimes of the powerless rather than the powerful. That said, the concept of state crime, from the active perpetration of harm to culpable failure to protect, has now become of growing interest within the field of criminology despite the very controversial and difficult nature of the subject area. That the state is now subject to academic critical interrogation is important, not least because of the obvious irony that it is states and governments themselves which usually decide what is to be considered criminal or otherwise. The rationale for this module is that students and the broader public do not normally think of their states and the political leaders therein as criminal or deviant. The module, seeks to stimulate debate and discussion around the question of state crime, its parameters and the complexities therein.
This module seeks to explore the definition and nature of state crime in criminological and political discourse. It aims to develop a critical understanding of the nature of the state and the scale and type of crimes committed by state agents and agencies; A range of state crimes will be explored in both the domestic and international spheres. Terrorism, for example, while commonly deployed to describe acts of violence directed against states is, also deployed by states themselves against target populations. Other topics include genocide, torture, ‘natural’ disasters, political corruption, criminal policing, death while in detention, war crimes, state-corporate deviance and state crimes against asylum seekers and refugees. The module will explore forms of state crime as techniques of ‘coercive governance’ and will use examples from both democratic and authoritarian regimes.
c. Credit weighting / 10/15/20/25/30 / 20 credit points
d. Level / F4/F5/F6/F7 / F5
e. Relationship to programme course / Mandatory, elective / Elective
f. Name of syllabus or programme / BSSc. Hons Criminology and & Criminal Justice
BSSc. Hons Politics
g. Offered within joint or combined programme? / Yes, no / Yes – offered as an elective to Politics, Social Policy, Law students
h. Mapping to JACS code / Free text - or a controlled list of options of JACS codes / TBC
i. Mapping to subject benchmarks / Free text - or options from the subject benchmark statements / Knowledge and Understanding
Intellectual Skills
Professional and Subject Specific Skills
Transferable Skills
j. Mapping to pedagogic vocab (to be advised) / Free text / TBC
k. Learning outcomes / Free text / A successful student will be able to show that he/she can:
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
K1 Identify the salient characteristics and activities that define state crime
K2 Recognise and interpret a range of theoretical accounts of state crime
K3 Apply their knowledge of theory and practice of state crime to a range of case studies from both domestic and authoritarian regimes
INTELLECTUAL QUALITIES
I 1 Understand and apply increasingly complex theories and concepts and understand the relationship between concepts and the real world
I2 Analyse complex political arguments and demonstrate the ability to evaluate them
I3 Show a capacity to think independently and demonstrate good discretionary judgement
I4 Construct persuasive arguments and present them orally and in writing
PROFESSIONAL/PRACTICAL SKILLS
P1 Participate in academic discussion in a professional manner
P2 Plan and organise tasks within set time frames
TRANSFERABLE SKILLS
T1 Reflect critically upon their own learning and make use of feedback
T2 Demonstrate skills relating to the capacity for abstraction, deduction, critical analysis, systematic retrieval of relevant materials, and reasoning
T3 Make proficient use (or organise use) of word processing
T4 Use standard library and information retrieval systems including the internet
T5 Demonstrate good written communication skills
l. Assessment type / TBC /
MODULE ASSESSMENT
The aim of all assessments is to give students the opportunity to review, consolidate and reflect on their learning and to demonstrate the extent to which they have acquired knowledge, understanding and skills. Hence, several modes of assessment are employed in this module. Formative assessment involves course-based assessment work and accounts for 50% of the total marks available for this module. It will give staff and students an early indication of their performance while providing a foundation for the summative assessment in a sessional examination that accounts for the remaining 50%. The overall assessment scheme is as follows:Coursework 1: Essay
Students will be required to submit a 1750 - 2000 word essay (worth 30% of the total marks available in the module) which will test your ability to understand and critique a range of sources and to present complex arguments in a coherent and structured way. This assignment will assess the following module learning outcomes: K1, K2, K3, I1, I4, T2, T3, T4, T5.
Coursework 2: Current Affairs Resources and Seminars
Students will be required to attend and participate in all seminar sessions (worth 20% of the total marks available in the module). Marks will be awarded for individual participation, not groups, on a weekly basis. There will, obviously, be a close correlation between a student’s attendance record and the mark awarded for participation. In effect, if a student is absent from class, marks cannot be awarded for participation. Each week, you must bring a newspaper to the seminar with a clearly highlighted article related to that week’s topic. You should be able to comment on how the piece relates to the topic of the previous lecture. Each article is worth 2% of the marks – 10 seminars in total making 20%. Students will be assessed on the quality of the material that they bring to class each week from ‘current affairs’ resources and their articulation of the relevance of this material to the theories and concepts discussed in lectures. You are required to submit a FULL hard copy of your seminar articles at the end of the semester and provide a written commentary on each piece which will build on feedback given in the seminars. Failure to submit your material in hard copy invalidates your seminar contributions and you will be awarded a mark of 0%. This assignment will assess the following module learning outcomes: K3, I2, I3, I4, P1, P2, T1.
Examination
There is an end of term unseen examination comprising 8-10 questions of which students will be expected to answer any 3 questions in a 3 hour period. The examination is worth 50% of marks available on the module. The examination will measure the student’s achievement of learning outcomes K1, K2, K3, I1, I2, I3, I4, T2, T5.m. Delivery / Weekly lecture / seminar [etc - revise] blended / online / face to face / A range of teaching methods are used which enable students to participate as fully as possible and which maximise the breadth of their learning experience.
Lectures will be used to introduce the students to the core concepts and case studies under consideration. An overview of each lecture will also be available on WebCT in written format. The lectures will be interactive and will use, for example, an ‘audience response system’ (ARS) to improve attentiveness in class, help engage passive listeners in the class, improve knowledge retention, and confirm the students understanding (or not) of key points almost immediately.
Seminars will be used for students to share their understandings of the concepts and case studies and to present to their classmates an synopsis/overview of how the theoretical concepts discussed in the lectures relate to the ‘real world’ through the application of the theory to contemporary news items. Practical exercises, such as role plays, will be used so that students can practice and observe others practice their persuasive argument skills in relation to the case studies.
Online discussion forums will be used to continue the debates and discussions around the topics under consideration and to allow students to post links to relevant media stories which help relate the lectures and seminars to the ‘real world’. Students will be expected to contribute at least one postings per week to the online discussion forum. As such, the module is web dependent.
In independent learning, students are expected to utilise the extensive range of learning resources available within the University to contribute to their learning and assessment and to enable them to acquire key and subject specific skills.
Structure and core content
n. Module core materials description, repeated for each material i.e. weekly lecture / handout / activity. Each element will contain the main resource or material, with further optional rows beneath to show other components of the resource which could be disaggregated. This should help give an extra granular level of description within the module materials.
So in this example, the description of the weekly materials and the further resources (such as reading lists) are drawn from the module handbook. For each exemplar module you may have to add or remove further rows below each weekly item (for example, if you use structured assessment as part of each material).
Again, please see this now as a first iteration of the mapping process – it may difficult to apply with any consistency across our materials, so your initial feedback on this process will be very valuable in developing this mapping framework and the version for the toolkit website.
When this mapping framework is presented in the toolkit, the links to the materials can be directed into JORUM as a persistent link (i.e. directly to the material). This can be added at a later stage.
File types TBC / I Content
n.1 / PDF / Lecture 1
Studying the Crimes of the State: An Introduction
This week considers the ‘big question: why is there a focus on crimes of the ‘powerless’ rather than the crimes of the ‘powerful’?
Seminar
In the seminar students are asked to explore the following questions:
Why have so many criminologists overlooked state crime?
Why are crimes of the state so difficult for conventional criminology to deal with?
What does this tell us about the different constructive schemes at work in mainstream criminology?
n. 1.a / Reading list / Neubacher, F. (2006) ‘How Can it Happen That Horrendous State Crimes are Perpetrated? An Overview of Criminological Theories’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 4 (4).
Haveman, R. and Alette Smeulers (Eds.), (2009) Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes, Antwerp: Intersentia. Chapter 1.
Rothe, D.L. and Ross J.I., (2008) ‘The Marginalization of State Crime in Introductory Textbooks on Criminology’, Critical Sociology 34(5) 741-752
Whyte, D. (2009) Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. See the Introduction: Studying the Crimes of the Powerful, pp.1-4 and also Section 1: State, Violence, Crime, pp.5-26.
Whyte, D. (2009) Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. See Section 5: Explanations, pp.130-165.
n. 1.b / Reflection / Question for consideration based on readings: What types of activities might be classified as ‘state crime’? What are some of the explanations offered for why ‘state crime’ happens?
n.2 / PDF / Lecture 2
Defining State Crime
This week considers both narrow legalism or moral crusades as ways of defining state crime. Drawing on a ‘complicity continuum’ it looks at explicit acts of commission, implicit acts of commission, explicit acts of omission, and implicit acts of omission.
n. 2.a / Reading list / Whyte, D. (2009) Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader. Maidenhead: Open University press. See Section 6: Definitions, pp.170--210.
Green, P. & Ward, T. (2004) State Crime: Governments. Violence and Corruption, London: Pluto. See chapter 1: Defining the State As Criminal, pp. 1-10.
Matthews, R.A. & Kauzlarich, D. (2007), ‘State crimes and state harms: a tale of two definitional frameworks’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 48, pp. 43–55.
Kauzlarich, David, Mullins, Christopher and Matthews, Rick (2003)'A complicity continuum of state crime * This paper was originally prepared for presentation at the 2000 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco.',Contemporary Justice Review,6 (3), pp. 241 — 254.
Rothe, D.L, Jeffrey Ian Ross, Christopher W. Mullins, David Friedrichs, GreggBarak, Ronald C. Kramer, Dave Kauzlarich, and Raymond Michalowski. 2009. “That Was Then, This is Now, What About Tomorrow? Future Directions in State Crime Studies”. Critical Criminology: An International Journal. Vol. 17, No. 1: 3-13.
Haveman, R. and Alette Smeulers (Eds.), (2009) Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes, Antwerp: Intersentia. Chapter 2.
n.2.b / Reflection / Questions for consideration: Can/should harmful activities of the state can be defined as crimes? Why might criminology provide a useful framework to study state crimes?
Think about your weekly articles each week and try to decide WHICH category (explicit, implicit, commission, omission) they fit into best and why….
Look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Consider whether violations of some of the ‘rights’ by the state would constitute a ‘state crime’ in your mind. If so, why? If not, why not?
n.3 / PDF / Lecture 3
War, Aggression and State Crime
This lecture begins with an overview of different concepts/ideas such as Jus Ad Bellum and Jus in Bello and documents such as the UN Charter and Nuremberg Charter. The main focus of the class is around the different TYPES of war crimes (as defined in the Nuremberg Charter) and recent case studies for debate/discussion/ illustration (eg. Operation Cast Lead in Israel/Gaza in 2009)
n. 3.a / Reading list / Green, P. & Ward, T. (2004) State Crime: Governments. Violence and Corruption.London: Pluto. See chapter 9: War Crimes, pp. 147-164.
Ronals C Kramer & Raymond J Michalowski, ‘War, Aggression and State Crime: A Criminological Analysis of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq’, British Journal of Criminology, 45, pp.446-469.
Kauzlarich, David (2007) 'Seeing War as Criminal: Peace Activist
Views and Critical Criminology', Contemporary Justice Review, 10:1, 67 – 85
Tilly, C (2009) ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Whyte, D. (2009) Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp.38-40.
n.3.b / Reflection / Questions for consideration: Was the invasion of Iraq a ‘war crime’?
What's the difference between war making and state making?
n.3.c / Formative Assessment / A series of multiple choice questions based on weeks 1 & 2 readings using an ‘audience response system’ in class to maximise knowledge retention and encourage discussion and debate.
n.4 / PDF / Lecture 4
State Terror and Terrorism
This lecture looks at examples of internal and external state terrorism; terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy; state-sponsored and state-supported terrorism.
n. 4.a / Reading list / Green, P. & Ward, T. (2004) State Crime: Governments. Violence and Corruption.London: Pluto. See chapter 7: State Terror and Terrorism, pp. 105-123.
Newburn, T. (2007) Criminology. Cullompton: Willan. See chapter 34: Globalisation, Terrorism and Human Rights, pp. 868 – 877.
Herman, E. (2009), ‘The Real Terror Network’, in Whyte, D. (2009) Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 178-182.
n.4.b / Reflection / Questions for consideration: What are some of the main characteristics of ‘state terrorism’?
n.5 / PDF / Lecture 5
Genocide
This lecture looks at genocide in the 20th and 21st century. It focuses particularly on the Holocaust during the second world war though gives mention to other examples of genocide such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda.
n. 5.a / Reading list / Green, P. & Ward, T. (2004) State Crime: Governments. Violence and Corruption.London: Pluto. See chapter 10: genocide. pp. 165 – 184.
Gourevitch, P. (1999). We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Woolford, A. (2006) ‘Making genocide Unthinkable: Three Guidelines for a Critical Criminology of Genocide’, Critical Criminology, 14, pp. 87–106.
Haveman, R. and Alette Smeulers (Eds.), (2009) Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes, Antwerp: Intersentia. Chapter 6. & 9.
n.5.b / Reflection / Questions for consideration: What is meant by the term ‘genocide’?
n.6 / PDF / Lecture 6
Torture
This lecture begins with an overview of the language that is used to explain torturous practices. It highlights the different laws and documents that students should be aware of such as the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984); the UN Declaration of Human Right (Article 5); the Declaration of Tokyo 1975(WMA); and the Bybee Memo 2002 (US). It then moves to consider the ‘purpose’ of torture, the excuses that may be given and the techniques of neutralisation that may be used. T then asks the most fundamental question relating to this topic: ‘Is torture ever justified’?
n. 6.a / Reading list / Green, P. & Ward, T. (2004) State Crime: Governments. Violence and Corruption.London: Pluto. See chapter 8: Torture, pp. 124 – 146.
MacKinnon, C. (2009) ‘Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues’, in Whyte, D. (2009) Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp.238-244.
Haveman, R. and Alette Smeulers (Eds.), (2009) Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes, Antwerp: Intersentia. Chapter 11.