The reason and motivation behind researching and writing the book is presented, along with a description of the individual chapter content. A series of research questions are posed, with the intended purpose and role of bringing together the diverse content and analysis that is presented across the chapters.

The history of waste records a relationship that has altered over time, resulting in various literal and symbolic manifestations. Waste Studies crosses conventional disciplines to offer ethical frameworks which pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste. With examples from novelists Toni Morrison and Wolfgang Hilbig, this chapter illustrates a number of aspects of waste in literature: waste as material agent; waste as metaphor; and narratives structured as waste, with little hope for clarity. The strategy of slow practice through narrative construction can prove a means to inculcate an ecological sensitivity and awareness we carry with us beyond the act of reading. While waste categories often are used to dismiss, deny, and reject certain humans, other-than-human agents, and material items, waste has also been used as a means to provoke compassion and ethical engagement by which we can develop a compassionate commonality with wasted beings to act for them, for us, and for the world. Waste Studies argues that the humanities can vibrantly and dynamically work to improve all of our lives in a concrete and material way.

Whether in biblical times, during the Middle Ages, or in the twenty-first century, terrorist strikes were then and are now first of all communicative acts intended to get attention in particular communities, countries, regions or even around the globe. The more people witness terrorist violence or learn of horrific attacks from news reports, the more successful are the perpetrators of political violence in furthering the universal goal of terrorists throughout history: achieving the greatest amount of publicity. The one trait that all non-state terrorist groups and lone wolves have shared throughout the history of terrorism has been their quest for attention and spreading fear among their enemies, the recognition of their grievances and demands, and the sympathies of those in whose name they claimed to act. In that respect nothing changed in the maxim that terrorism is ‘propaganda by deed’. Once communication technology was invented, from the printing press, radio, television to the Internet and particular social media platforms, all terrorists have striven for and many have found alternative media to disseminate their own propaganda in written and spoken words, visuals and even motion pictures. Yet, even in the age of mass self-communication, made possible by social media, the traditional media have remained central in the propaganda calculus of all terrorists, in that old and new communication modes have complemented each other.

Stouffer was a student of Ogburn and during the 1930s worked with Lazarsfeld on various research projects before taking the lead in the massive American Soldier study during World War II in which ‘modern statistical sociology’ came of age. Lazarsfeld, after early social research in his native Austria, established the Office of Radio Research at Columbia and in 1941 was appointed Associate Professor in Sociology conjointly with Merton. The two then formed a close collaborative relationship. Both separately and together, Stouffer, Lazarsfeld and Merton significantly advanced the design and application of survey research in sociology and also sought to develop ‘middle-range’ theories that could offer explanations of specific, clearly demonstrated social phenomena: forexample, theories of reference groups, cross-pressures, and the ‘two-step’ flow of mass communications. Their research tended, however, to be focused on social relations within relatively small-scale milieu and the development of theory applicable at a more macro-level was thus constrained -- as also by Merton’s withdrawal from the Weberian orientation evident in his early years and by Lazarsfeld’s difficulties with Weber’s action theory.

The Conclusion draws together the most important arguments arising from the preceding chapters and offers a commentary on the methodological and historiographical implications of the book for our understanding of popular Conservatism, and popular politics more broadly, in twentieth-century Britain. It highlights three phenomena that shaped the character of inter-war Conservatism. The first is the fact that party activists saw the task of cultivating the new electorate in resolutely local terms, reflecting their abiding commitment to pre-war conceptions of popular Conservatism and how it operated. The second is the role that voters’ material interests played in shaping activists’ understanding of representative politics; the methodological point here being that the agency of local activists, hitherto emphasized in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, was circumscribed by existing and inescapable agendas defined by trade, employment, economic prosperity, living standards and amenities. The third phenomenon is the growing significance of modern central government to the enterprise of popular politics between the wars: electoral strategies in the constituencies rested on the assumption that living standards could be successfully managed by government initiative. The chapter concludes by exploring how the Conservatism of the 1930s therefore fostered a programmatic, activist culture of government that did much to foreshadow the statist turn of British politics in the 1940s and 1950s.