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Disability as a consequential social characteristic has not drawn sociologists’ contemporary attention in the way that race, class, gender, and sexuality have. In order to understand why, it is instructive to analyze how disability has been framed since the inception of the American Sociological Society, now known as the American Sociological Association.

Our findings are based on an intensive, systematic, and comprehensive content analysis of 10 years of the Proceedings from the American Sociology Society’s Annual Meetings, 1906–1915.

Three key themes emerged from the content analysis of the proceedings of the first 10 years of the papers delivered at the Annual Meetings (1906–1915). First, people with disabilities were largely invisible in those papers. Second, influenced strongly by a social reform agenda which stressed progress and the powerful eugenics movement of the time, those early presenters who addressed people with disabilities in their papers vilified them. Third, their denigration was met largely with silence in the printed commentary which followed in the proceedings.

In order to understand the present limited attention to disability, researchers need to know the historical context.

Although there have been a number of thoughtful books, edited volumes and review essays exploring the history of the discipline of sociology, none of them have attended to the history of disability within the field. This paper contributes to that historical understanding.

Erica S. Breslau, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a scientific program director in the Applied Cancer Screening Research Branch, in the Behavioral Research Program within the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Breslau’s research interests focus on women’s oncology issues in general, and specifically as they pertain to the social, behavioral, and psychological influences associated with breast, gynecological and colorectal cancer screening. Recent efforts include ensuring that research is able to inform and improve the quality of health services among women disproportionately affected with breast and cervical cancer through the dissemination of evidence-based intervention approaches. She has conducted population-based research in the area of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases in military populations, and has implemented large-scale health promotion approaches to improve the adoption of prevention practices. Dr. Breslau received her Ph.D. in Public Health from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her Master’s in Public Health from Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.Vasilikie Demos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.Heather Hartley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. Dr. Hartley’s research interests include the sociology of health and medicine, the sociology of gender, the sociology of sexualities, and political sociology. Within these general specialty areas, her work focuses on the politics of women’s health, the pharmaceutical industry and the changing distribution of power within the health care system.Beth E. Jackson is a Doctoral Student in Sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on the traditions of feminist epistemologies and critical social studies of science, her dissertation research puts questions of epistemic authority and the nature of evidence into the specific context of public health and epidemiology. Specifically, she explores the conditions, contexts, tools and processes through which public health knowledge claims are made, by focusing on a particular technology of “population health” i.e. the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) (a longitudinal, biennial survey of the mental and physical health of Canadians and their use of health care services). Her research also speaks to policy implications of “situated” data and evidence – in this case, the implications of how “women’s health” is defined, and the extent to which a gendered analysis of health is considered in the construction and analysis of the NPHS.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She conducts research in the areas of health policy, health across the life course, health behavior including preventive health behavior, and research into AIDS in geographically mobile populations. She has recently authored Health Care Policy: Issues and Trends (Praeger, 2002). She has conducted research in a variety of topics related to child health, including recruitment into CHIP (child health insurance program) and has published a book on the impact of school based health clinics, Schools and the Health of Children (Sage, 2000). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and past chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Nancy Luke is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University and a Research Fellow in the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. Her primary research interest is the impact of social organization on health and well-being, particularly among women and adolescents. She is presently co-Principal Investigator of two research projects, both of which include collection of household survey and ethnographic data. A project in Kenya studies the influence of marriage and economic transactions on sexual behavior in an area of high HIV/AIDS prevalence, and a project in India examines women’s empowerment in a context where norms sanction intimate partner violence. She has also collaborated with numerous non-governmental organizations on research projects pertaining to reproductive health and gender equity in developing countries. Dr. Luke has a Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.Deborah Parra-Medina, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina with joint appointments in the Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior (HPEB) and Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology at the UC San Diego, an M.P.H. in Health Promotion at San Diego State University and a B.A. in Social Science at UC Berkeley. She has extensive experience working with under-served communities, having worked in several chronic disease prevention and control efforts including cancer screening, tobacco control, weight loss and nutrition. Her research based on a participatory action model emphasizes the intersections of race, class and gender and the influence of socio-cultural environment on adaptive and maladaptive health behaviors. This perspective is exemplified in her current research. She is Principle Investigator of the SC American Legacy Empowerment (SCALE) Evaluation Project that is examining how to effectively engage youth as agents for social change within the context of tobacco prevention and control. Dr. Parra-Medina was recently awarded a pilot study grant from NCI, the broad goal of this project is to foster individual and organizational empowerment among the emerging Hispanic population in South Carolina in relation to cancer prevention and health promotion through the development of the South Carolina Hispanic Health Coalition: Partnership for Cancer Prevention (PCP).Colleen Reid recently completed her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in health promotion research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation was a feminist action research project with a group of women on low income. Together they examined the relationship between exclusion and health, the women’s varied discourses of poverty and health, and the promises and challenges of engaging in feminist action research. Dr. Reid has also been involved in community health research projects with organizations including the Vancouver YWCA, AIDS Vancouver, Literacy B.C., and the B.C. Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health.Elianne Riska is von Willebrand-Fahlbeck Professor of Sociology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland since 1985. She has been Chairperson of the Department of Sociology 1985–1997 and Director of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Åbo Akademi University 1986–1993. Elianne Riska received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974. She was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University from 1974 to 1981. She was Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland 1997–2002. She is currently the President of the Research Committee of the Sociology of Health (RC15) of the International Sociological Association (2002–2006). Her most recent books are Gender, Work and Medicine (Sage, 1993), Gendered Moods (Routledge, 1995) and Medical Careers and Feminist Agendas: American, Scandinavian, and Russian Women Physicians (Aldine de Gruyter, 2001).Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and a Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association and past chair of the American Sociological Association Sections on Sex and Gender and Race, Gender and Class.Lynn Weber is a Director of the Women’s Studies Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. For the 2002–2003 year, she is Visiting Professor in the Consortium for Research on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity and the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality particularly as they are manifest in women’s health, in the process of upward social mobility and work, and in the creation of an inclusive classroom environment. In 2001 and 2002, she published two books, Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework and Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: Case Studies (NY: McGraw-Hill) which are intended to move the field of intersectional scholarship ahead by serving as a guide to facilitate intersectional analyses and to foster more integrative thinking in the classroom. Dr. Weber is also co-author of The American Perception of Class.

We propose an elaboration of the social structure and personality framework from sociological social psychology that is intended to promote integration across social psychological traditions and between social psychology and sociology, using the study of inequality as an example.

We develop a conceptualization of “generic” proximate processes that produce and reproduce inequality in face-to-face interaction: status, identity, and justice.

The elaborated framework suggests fundamental questions that analysts can pose about the macro-micro dynamics of inequality. These questions direct attention to the “how” and “why” of macro-micro relations by connecting structural and cultural systems, local contexts, and the lives of individual persons; highlighting implicit processes; making meaning central; and directing our attention to how people act efficaciously in the face of constraint.

Applying this framework, scholars can use existing theories and generate new ones, and can do so inductively or deductively.

Research on inequality is enriched by social psychological analyses that draw on the full complement of relevant methods and theories.

We make visible the social psychological underpinnings of sociological research on inequality and provide a template for macro-micro analyses that emphasizes the centrality of social psychological processes.

Barack Obama has had considerable support among scholarly circles since his win in the Iowa primary in early 2008. A segment of the Association of Black Sociologists (ABS), “Black and Progressive Sociologists Obama Working Group (BPSOWG),” was particularly active during the 2008 campaign. The purpose of this chapter was to determine if the level and type of activism among this group differed from other progressive groups of sociologists.

The data for this study were collected from a web-based survey administered to approximately 800 professional sociologists in the United States. The survey consisted of items that focused on the extent to which respondents supported the Obama campaign for the presidency and the extent to which they were satisfied with and/or agreed with his policies during first two years of his presidency.

The response rate for the survey was 40% (N=305) and 96% of respondents (N=293) submitted surveys with complete information. Over two-thirds of participants were members of the American Sociological Association Section on Race and Ethnic Relations and 5.5% of respondents identified themselves as members of the BPSOWG. A slight majority (53.6%) of study participants were females and the largest two racial groups making up the study population were whites (47.1%) and African Americans (36.1%). Most of the respondents provided support for President Obama during his first campaign, including financial contributions (66%).

Sociologists who responded to the survey were generally positive about Barack Obama as a candidate and a President. However, the subtle differences between groups about Obama administration policies and the use Presidential power highlighted key areas in which diverse coalitions for progressive change are needed.

This chapter compares interdisciplinary research that engages genomic science from economics, political science, and sociology. It describes, compares, and evaluates concepts and research findings from new and rapidly developing research fields, and develops a conceptual taxonomy of the social environment.

A selection of programmatic and empirical articles, published mostly since 2008 in leading economics, political science, and sociology journals, were analyzed according to (a) the relationship they pose between their discipline and genomic science, (b) the specific empirical contributions they make to disciplinary research questions, and (c) their conceptualization of the “social environment” as it informs the central problematique of current inquiry: gene-environment interaction.

While all three of the social science disciplines reviewed engage genomic science, economics and political science tend to engage genomics on its own terms, and develop genomic explanations of economic and political behavior. In contrast, sociologists develop arguments that for genomic science to advance, the “environment” in gene-environment interaction needs better theorization and measurement. We develop an approach to the environment that treats it as a set of measurable institutional (rule-like) arrangements, which take the forms of neighborhoods, families, schools, nations, states, and cultures.

Interdisciplinary research that combines insights from the social sciences and genomic science should develop and apply a richer array of concepts and measures if gene-environment research – including epigenetics – is to advance.

This chapter provides a critical review and redirection of three rapidly developing areas of interdisciplinary research on gene-environment interaction and epigenetics.

Mary Bernstein is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles in the fields of social movements, identity, sexualities, gender, and law and is coeditor of three books. Recent articles include “What Are You? Explaining Identity as a Goal of the Multiracial Hapa Movement,” “Identity Politics,” and “Culture, Power, and Institutions: A Multi-Institutional Politics Approach to Social Movements” (coauthored with Elizabeth Armstrong) which won the Outstanding Article Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements (2009).