What is a ‘social problem’, what is not? What are legitimate means in addressing them? Following a decade of neoliberal offensive against the welfare state, post-communist countries have found themselves with a host of new (often externally-defined) “social problems”, to be tackled with Soviet-era institutions. Sexual harassment, parents versus children rights, poverty, regional discrepancies, drug addiction, the proliferation of religious cults: these examples of hotly debated “social problems” and the means enacted to tackle them in post-communist Europe inform and structure our seminar, together with theoretical texts in the sociology of social problems and deviation by Erving Goffman, Howard Becker, Malcolm Spector, John Kitsuse, and Joel Best.