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The purpose this course is to assist you in developing a better understanding of what deviance is and why it matters. Any course on the sociology of deviance has the general objective of illuminating “how society defines what is strange or normal, acceptable or unacceptable” (Haenfler 2013: 2). We will spend the first half of the course developing our knowledge about what deviance is and how we can understand it using different theoretical tools. Over the rest of the course, we will look more closely, and critically, at different forms of deviance, societal reactions and attempts to control deviance, and how people and groups resist deviant labels. Throughout this exploration process, we will continue applying our theoretical knowledge to understand how and why certain things and people are called deviant while others are not.