Recent ucsb_library_oabooks items

The Equilibrium Theory of Inhomogeneous Polymers

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book provides an introduction to the field-theoretic methods and computer simulation techniques used in the design of structured polymeric fluids for a wide variety of applications. By such methods, the principles that dictate equilibrium self-assembly in systems ranging from block and graft copolymers, to polyelectrolytes, liquid crystalline polymers, and polymer nanocomposites can be established. Building on an introductory discussion of single-polymer statistical mechanics, the book provides a detailed treatment of analytical and numerical techniques for addressing the statistical properties of polymers subjected to spatially-varying potential fields. This problem is shown to be central to the field-theoretic description of interacting polymeric fluids, and models for a number of important polymer systems are elaborated. Self-consistent field theory is treated in detail, which is a collection of analytical and numerical techniques for obtaining solutions of polymer...

Speaking Rights to Power: Constructing Political Will

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How can “Speaking Rights to Power” construct political will to respond to human rights abuse worldwide? Examining dozens of cases of human rights campaigns, this book shows how communication politics build recognition, solidarity, and social change. The book presents an innovative analysis of the politics of persuasion, based in the strategic use of voice, framing, media, protest performance, and audience bridging. Building on twenty years of research on five continents, this comprehensive study ranges from Aung San Suu Kyi to Anna Hazare, from Congo to Colombia, from Arab Spring to Pussy Riot. It includes both well-chronicled campaigns like the struggle to end violence against women, as well as lesser-known efforts, such as interethnic human rights alliances in the United States. Cases of relative success are carefully compared with unavailing struggles. The author's analysis is grounded in the concrete practice of human rights campaigns and derives testable strategic guidance...

Queer Traffic: Sex, Panic, Free Trade

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides...