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Study bachelor degree online with Griffith University through Open Universities Australia. Explore all degrees, subjects and short courses now.

Be prepared for a future career as an innovator, communicator and creator. With our innovative majors you can tailor your degree to both your professional pursuits and your personal interests, creating a unique skill set that could help you secure your dream job.
You will gain the understanding, insight and skill to find and communicate creative solutions to important world issues. You will develop advanced writing and presentation skills as well as research and project management skills. You will also learn about societies and cultures, past and present.
You will have the option to develop specialist expertise in contemporary fields such as journalism and public relations, or more traditional fields such as sociology, history and literary studies to name some.

Develop critical thinking, writing, and research skills in demand across all industries. You can follow your passion with majors and electives that interest you. Develop connections through peer learning, networking, and work experience.

Bachelor of Arts

Health and Wellbeing in Social and Cultural Contexts

Introduction to Cultural Studies

Drugs in Society

Mind, "Madness" and Society: An Introduction to the Sociology of Mental Illness

Popular Music, Culture and Identity

Gender, Crime and Justice

Digital Culture and Everyday Life

Culture, Health and Healing

Health and Society

Sex and Gender Matters

This subject was previously known as Sociology of Crime and Crime, Society and Culture.This subject introduces foundational and contemporary social theories of crime and justice. Theories are examined in their socio-historical context, with attention given to the role of theory in knowledge production about crime causation, criminal justice policy, and social views of justice.Criminology is the social scientific study of crime – its causes, its effects, and how societies respond to crime. Yet these questions are rarely straightforward. Historically, all societies have sought to control crime or deviance, and all cultures have explanations as to why and how people do bad or wicked things. But how crime is defined varies significantly between cultures and societies, and often within them. Criminology in this regard is a fairly new historical invention, its origins dating fewer than two hundred years. Yet even within this time, the social sciences have developed diverse and sometimes conflicting explanations, theories and approaches to understanding, explaining, and redressing crime. Anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, socio-legal studies, and sociology all evidence distinct epistemological and methodological approaches to questions of what causes crime, how crime is defined, and how we should respond to crime.How we define crime is also intrinsically tied to how we collectively and individually define justice. This question is essential in understanding how societies formally and informally define and respond to crime. Formal responses include criminal and civil justice mechanisms tasked with several overlapping and sometimes competing aims such as retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and public safety. Informal responses include social norms and values, social movements, and collective social actions. In some cases there is strong alignment between formal and informal definitions and justice values in society, for example in the case of drink-driving which was once more widely tolerated but over time has become seen by the majority of the public and thus dealt with by policymakers as a serious offence. In other cases there is less alignment between formal and informal definitions and responses to crime, for example in current debates about how to best respond to illicit drug use – through a criminal justice approach, or through a public health approach that decriminalises or legalises use and distribution of some types of illicit drugs?In this regard, theories of crime and justice are not abstracted from the daily experiences and problems in people’s lives. On the contrary, we all “theorise,” every day, in our own lives. When a friend is arrested for drink driving, we theorise how we should respond to them. Do we agree they should lose their license as a result? Do we think they should be required to undergo treatment? What should they have to do in order to take responsibility for this offence and be allowed to drive again? We theorise when we are victimised – why did someone harm us, and what should be done about it? We theorise when bad things happen to people and nothing is done about it.All of this is “theorising,” where we draw from what we know or believe about “what works” and we compare or contrast that against what we know about the situation we are examining. One problem of subject is that we are sometimes wrong – individually and collectively – and part of the role of the social sciences is to investigate and challenge “common sense” notions of crime and justice. This does not mean that the social sciences are above reproach, or that social science itself is infallible. On the contrary, as we will see, the social sciences have offered explanations of crime ranging from the plausible to the absurd. What the social sciences provide, however, is a set of rules or guidelines for how to make knowledge claims about crime beyond that of our own experiences or common sense, and how to test and retest these claims until they are more widely accepted or rejected in lieu of other explanations.Another issue, however, is that people often have very different perspectives on what counts as justice. Social science can measure these attitudes and beliefs, but it is a relatively poor vehicle for making moral statements. Justice and injustice are subjective concepts, which often depend on people’s individual and collective social experiences. What social science does offer, however, is the possibility for us to transcend our own experiences and look at ourselves and our beliefs from the perspective of how others define and experience injustice. For more than a century these have been primary goals of sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences that seek to understand how people experience and make sense of the world, beyond testing hypotheses or measuring social phenomenon.This class explores and investigates these big questions through the lens of social scientific theories and research on crime, justice, and society. As criminology is a multidisciplinary field of study, emphasis is given to sociological, socio-legal, social-psychological, philosophical, and other approaches. Emphasis is also given to exploring and understanding “the social construction of knowledge” – how knowledge about these questions is produced, what type of knowledge are privileged (or silenced) and why, and how such knowledge shapes people’s symbolic and material realities in concrete ways.Students should not enrol in this subject if they have completed CCJ27 Sociology of Crime or CCJ207 Crime, Society and Culture.

Crime, Society and Justice

The aim of this subject is to apply critical perspectives to popular music as a key form of cultural production, consumption and leisure in contemporary everyday life. In doing so the unit will apply a range of sociological concepts and theories ranging from Marxism and cultural Marxism through to more recent post-structuralist approaches including postmodernism, reflexive modernity and risk. The unit will also draw on approaches applied to the study of popular music in corresponding disciplines such as cultural studies and media studies.

Explore how popular music has become an essential part of culture and everyday life. You’ll use sociological theories like postmodernism to understand its significance. Study popular music in depth. Get critical about the impact of music on society.

This subject was previously known as Introduction to Sociology.This subject introduces students to the social sciences in a fresh local context, both in terms of the theories social scientists use to explain Australian society and the way in which those theories have an impact on social life.Note: This subject is considered to be academically equivalent to CCJ108 Social Problems - (In)equality and (In)justice and CCJ18 Crime and Society.

Understanding the Social World

The term social problem is usually taken to refer to social conditions that affect a significant number of people within society in a negative way. Social problems are seen as being disruptive or damaging to society, as social injustices that we should be striving to solve. For example, crime and safety, violence, alcohol, and drug use are often constructed as significant social problems for many people in Australia while others are more concerned with inequality and discrimination. In fact, social problems like crime are often the consequence of factors extending beyond the individual&#39;s control, such as inequality, discrimination, prejudice, oppression, and concomitant social injustice. Sociology provides us with the critical thinking skills to understand the connection between social problems and the social structure including how social problems come to be &#39;problems&#39; in the first place. In this course, you will develop frameworks for critical sociological thought by exploring multiple intersectional axes of power, oppression, inequality, and social injustice including classism, racism and colonialism, sexism, heterosexism and transmisia, ableism, adultism, and ageism. You will learn how oppression and power within these spheres (and the intersections between them) are vital to understanding the social problems of most concern to the discipline of criminology and reflect on how (in)justice might be mitigated. The knowledge gained will equip you with the tools to do criminology in a socially just way.

Learn about different forms of power and oppression—and how they’re linked to social problems like crime. You’ll explore sociology and practice critical thinking. Approach criminology in a socially fair way.

Social Problems - (In)equality and (In)justice

This subject provides hands on experience of social research. The particular focus is the semi-structured qualitative interviews. You nominate a research topic and, with the assistance of the teaching team, draft a research plan to investigate that topic. You then undertake three semi-structured qualitative interviews and qualitative data analysis following templates and protocols provided by the research team.
Assessment involves preparation of a research plan, the submission of the first interview transcribed and with preliminary data analysis and personal reflections on the interview process, and a final research report collating the findings from the three interviews.

Discover the advantages and disadvantages of using the face-to-face interview as a research method. Select a topic to investigate and put forward a research plan. Run three qualitative interviews. Combine all your learnings in an in-depth report.

Research in Sociology

A key definition distinguishing human beings from other animals is that humans live in the knowledge of their mortality. This subject explores the human condition of death and dying as it draws from interdisciplinary research literatures and cultural objects, including film and memoir. It examines major psychological and psychoanalytic concepts of grief, mourning and melancholia as well as key themes on topics such as: death and memorialisation online; cross-cultural death rites and beliefs; the politics of mourning; legal issues and the politics of euthanasia; dark tourism; death and memoir; death and celebrity culture; death denial and taboo; death and representation; love and death.

Analyse how humans deal with death and incorporate mourning into our cultures. Reassess the rituals of grief. Probe the politics of euthanasia. Explore the social function of the cemetery. Track the ways that the internet has affected how we mourn.

Death, Grief and Culture

Please note: This subject was previously a level 1 subject with a different code (SGY130).
 &#39;Youth&#39; is a sociological construct that operates at multiple levels: an individual young person, an attitude for being in the social world, and an institution. We explore the two main branches of sociological research into the lives of young people; youth cultures and youth transitions.
You are introduced to a range of social identities (for example, sexuality, rurality), social institutions (such as education, family), and social identities (including subcultural, digital) that frame the experience of youth and draws on local, national and international examples to illustrate young people&#39;s negotiations of contemporary society.

Shine a light on youth culture at local, national and international levels. Think about how society transitions people through the stages of youth. Look at the nature of identity. Assess the role of the individual within an institution.

Sociology of Youth

Discover the main sociological theories of identity. You will explore contemporary debates surrounding identity through various sites used for the generation of social identities, for example, consumption, sexuality, class and gender. Through your studies, you will also explore the different ways in which contemporary social conditions, for example, the internet, consumption, globalisation, global warming and terrorism, and social categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, religion and social class variously structure identity possibilities.

Peel away the layers that form modern conceptions of identity. Unpack social categories like ethnicity, religion and class. Address the impact of globalisation and the internet. Realise how social conditioning can impact the formation of identity.

Sociology of Identity

Please note: This subject was previously known as &#39;History of Sex and Sexuality&#39;Sexuality saturates modern life. Our sexual and gender identities signal our selfhood to others and define who we are, whether that&#39;s straight, queer, trans or gender diverse, or one of many other possibilities. Sex is everywhere, from the sheets to the streets, to the internet. How we present ourselves, who we are intimate with, what we do and how often we do it is the subject of commentary, intervention, and regulation. But who has determined what&#39;s &#39;unnatural&#39; and what&#39;s &#39;normal and when? What have historical actors, experts and institutions said in the past about sex? And have ordinary people always followed the rules?This unit explores histories of sex and sexuality from antiquity to the present. Taking a chronological approach to private practices and erotic lives, we will investigate diverse topics, including prostitution, marriage, crossdressing, birth control, war, chastity, queer lives and the internet to identify historical change and continuity. The course focuses on practices, identities and attitudes in Europe, the US, and Australia to consider how gender, class and ethnicity inflect public narratives and intimate lives. Using primary sources and historical objects, you will investigate the meanings people and institutions attach to desire, bodies, and sexuality at different times and places and interrogate our contemporary sexual lives and their possibilities.

Turn the pages of time in the history of sex and sexuality. Cover sexology, romantic friendships, prophylaxis and queer lives – spanning from ancient times through to today. Explore how gender, class and ethnicity comes into play in intimacy.

Histories of Sexuality

Despite the public&#39;s obsession with crime, victimisation and criminal justice, despite the morbid fear that crime and victimisation arouses, despite the endless volumes written to account for offending, victimisation and criminal justice processing, gender, the most powerful social factor of all has been virtually ignored by criminologists.&quot; (Leonard, 1982). This course explores the persistent and profound differences women and men&#39;s experiences of crime. The course considers how gender intersects with other social categories such as race, class, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity to shape crime and responses to it.

Seek to explain the profound differences between genders in crime rates, patterns, victimisation, and criminal justice system experiences and responses. Then consider intersections between gender, Indigeneity, class and sexual orientation.

Griffith University Bachelor Degree Sociology Courses & Degrees | Open Universities Australia

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