Busy Busy Times! Presentations, Essays and Varsity!

Were approaching that time of year when everybody is busy, the last few weeks of second semster before the Easter break and right now I’m standing in the careers area writing this because all the PC’s with chairs are taken. I’ve had a fun time in the last week putting two presentations together, one was for my Sociology of Deviance module and the other for my Psychology and Crime module. The first was on a journal called ‘Everyday “Badness” in Young Black Males: an ethnographic study in an East London neighbourhood.’ I talked about the cultural style and attitudes of ‘badness’, how it is presented and maintained. Here’s a video link I used which sums up my presentation well;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ1D-a6xukM

You can see the attitude in the way they behave, using gang signs to represent their post-code and I also quoted the lyrics from the chrous “the streets of the cold roads, where the kids beef over post-code” because the beef over post-codes was mentioned throughout the journal. This was to explain that the crimes they committ, such as stealing mobile phones, is not to do with breaking the law but maintaining their ‘ends’ and status of respect. If somebody beats you down and steals your mobile phone then you have lost respect, you are now the victim and no longer the victimiser. This is street life through Youtube  media, but why film it? And why dress like that? Has the media created this culture or is it created though youth sub-cultures? Do we even have sub-cultures anymore? To quote Jeff Ferrell, this is a life where ‘the street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street’. You can probably tell I find Cultural Criminology quite interesting and I hope to do my own ethnographic study for my Third Year Dissertation.

The second presentation for Psychology and Crime was about Restorative Justice. This was a group presentation and I talked about the theory and risk factors involved. Restorative Justice is harm reduction for the individual and the community, therefore it targets criminogenic and non-criminogenic needs. You’ll learn about this in your second year but basically criminogenic needs are risk factors which predict future offending, such as previous convictions. And non-criminogenic are other factors, such as employment status.

Now I have to prepare another presentation for my Youth Crime module. Treadwell has been sneaky and decided not to tell us which week we will present, we just have to be prepared to present starting this week. On that point it’s good to have an idea of which topic you want to present well in advance, that way you can be efficent with your reading time. So because I like Cultural Criminology and Gangs, I did more reading the week that we covered that topic and hence I have lots of notes to give me a good start to my presentation. You should also practice and find out how you like to present, by memory or with lots of notes? I find notes distract me so for this presentation I’m going to read around the topic area and just talk about what I know, present my topic, it’ll feel more natural this way. The Careers Service have lots of advice sheets which you can take away with you, for essays, dissertations, presentations and note-making. Like I’ve said before, it helps to use the resources availble.

So ye, busy times! I have my fitness test this afternoon to get onto the Special Constable training, I’m applying for the Contact Volunteering Committe as VP Projects and Development and we have Varsity this week! Hangovers are expected so why put Varsity at the busiest time of the semester?? No hangovers allowed this Wednesday for the Mountaineering Varsity so were all going for a chilled out meal tonight at Bella Italia.

This week I’ll tell you how nice their food is, how my fitness test goes and if we smash DM(Who) at Varsity!