BACKGROUND Human biomonitoring (HBM) has rapidly gained importance. In some epidemiological studies, the measurement and use of biomarkers of exposure, susceptibility and disease have replaced traditional environmental indicators. While in HBM, ethical issues have mostly been addressed in terms of informed consent and confidentiality, this paper maps out a larger array of societal issues from a...

Genomics and molecular biology has added substantial methods and knowledge to nearly all fields of biology and medicine. In this review we try to demonstrate how genomics and molecular biology is also on the way to have a profound impact on behavioral anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary sociology, and bio-sociology. We propose that particularly studies on "selection and adaptati...

1 Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway, 2 Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, UMR 5175, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Université de Montpellier Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier EPHE, Montpellier, France, 3 Centre for Northern Studies, Université du Québec à Rimouski, Rimouski, QC, Canada, 4 Indigenous Environment...

How do we include animals in sociology? Although sociology’s initial avoidance of the nonhuman world may have been necessary to field’s development, recent scholarship – within mainstream sociology, environmental sociology and animal-centred research is helping expand horizons. With a focus on variety, this article reviews four key paths that researchers are taking their research: (1) studying ...

We use an association analysis-based strategy for exploration of multi-attribute spatial datasets possessing naturally arising classification. In this demonstration, we present a prototype system, ESTATE (Exploring Spatial daTa Association patTErns), inverting such classification by interpreting different classes found in the dataset in terms of sets of discriminative patterns of its attributes...

I begin this paper with summaries of environment and development perspectives foundational to contemporary environmental sociology: ecological modernization theory and treadmill of production theory. Descriptions of the perspectives are provided as well as an overview of recent quantitative cross-national analyses that evaluate the propositions of both theories. Next, I provide a summary of eco...

My thesis in sociology takes place in a big research program studying contaminated storm water in urban areas in order to develop new processes to cope with pollution. Most of the researchers of the program are biologists, chemists, hydrologists. The study also conveys sociology insisting on the importance of a multidisciplinary approach. Why would a sociologist be needed to help understand a t...

This issue of SER contains three articles on public sociology and economic sociology, which all have their origin in a session on this theme that was held at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 2006 in Montreal. The reason for organizing this session was a sense that ‘new economic sociology’ has ignored many of the issues that are associated with the term ‘publ...

Do all disciplines fret over the state of their own intellectual and policy-relevant health? Is it a symptom of our hyper-reflexive and confessional times that collective anxiety has to be rehearsed over the track record, and present and projected performance of a group of scholars? Medical sociology’s lengthy reflections on the state of its own practice are recognizable as part of a more gener...