Green criminology, or the study of environmental (“green”) harms, crime, and injustice, has explored a wide range of issues over the past three decades. An important environmental issue that has received little attention is species extinction. To facilitate the discussion about harms against animals from species extinction, this article reviews relevant literature and frames the processes propelling species extinction from a political economic green criminological (PEG-C) perspective. The driving motivation of capitalism—profit making—leads to continually expanding raw material extraction and production that contributes to escalating forms of ecological destruction that drives species extinction. The contemporary extinction cycle is called the 6th wave of extinction. Researchers in the hard sciences note that this 6th extinction is being caused by human behavior, making it distinct from the five previous extinction periods. They also note that there is little hope that this extinction period can be easily remedied. Significant alterations in environmental policy and human behavior are required to save species from extinction.

Climate change is little studied or taught by Bangladeshi sociologists, even though it poses significant threats to social life in the country. To uncover the level of importance given to climate change issues in sociology departments at Bangladeshi universities, this study analyzes data from six public universities. The data include sociology curricula and interviews with a selected group of teacher-sociologists. This paper unearths several critical factors behind the marginal responses to global warming from mainstream sociology in Bangladesh. First, sociologists seek to separate the discipline from other sciences by focusing solely on ‘social’ structure and social-scientific explanations. Sociology curricula have avoided the global warming agenda because of its allegedly ‘natural scientific’ nature. Second, sociologists are found to have a propensity to suspect teleology in general and to emulate the indifference towards the future found in contemporary society. With myopic vision, sociologists in Bangladesh tend to address immediate social ills while maintaining a safe distance from climate threats, which they view only as a future concern. Furthermore, a lack of expertise among Bangladeshi sociologists impedes the development of climate change courses.

Over the past few decades, sociology has experienced significant thematic and structural changes due to the rapid advancement of technology, growing social inequality, and changing forms of mobility and governance. The period 2010–2024 offers a significant window, spanning post-2008 economic restructuring, platform capitalism, COVID-19, and shifts in digital data infrastructures. Using bibliometric data and transformer-based topic modeling analysis, this study examines authorship patterns, institutional concentration, and thematic developments in 101,005 sociology articles published between 2010 and 2024. Our findings reveal that the University of Oxford leads in publication output (910 papers), while Ethnic and Racial Studies is the most prolific journal (3,214 papers). Gender distribution among authors is nearly balanced (50.4% female, 49.6% male), though ethnicity analysis shows significant disparities with White, non-Latino researchers comprising 61% of authorship. BERTopic analysis identified ten major research topics, with social theory and financial critique emerging as the dominant theme (9,016 documents). Temporal analysis demonstrates declining prominence of traditional theoretical topics and growing interest in mental sociology and gender studies. By mapping these patterns, the study offers an empirical foundation for understanding how sociology responds to broader societal changes and contributes to debates on equity, disciplinary boundaries, and future research trajectories.