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George W. Bush called it "the best job in the world," yet many would argue that the Texas governorship is a weak office. Given few enumerated powers by the Texas Constitution, the governor must build a successful relationship with the state legislature—sometimes led by a powerful lieutenant governor or speaker of the opposing party—to advance his or her policy agenda. Yet despite the limitations on the office and the power of the legislative branch, many governors have had a significant impact on major aspects of Texas's public life—government, economic development, education, and insurance reform among them. How do Texas governors gain the power to govern effectively?

The Power of the Texas Governor takes a fresh look at the state's chief executives, from John Connally to George W. Bush, to discover how various governors have overcome the institutional limitations of the office. Delving into the governors' election campaigns and successes and failures in office, Brian McCall makes a convincing case that the strength of a governor's personality—in particular, his or her highly developed social skills—can translate into real political power. He shows, for example, how governors such as Ann Richards and George W. Bush forged personal relationships with individual legislators to achieve their policy goals. Filled with revealing insights and anecdotes from key players in each administration, The Power of the Texas Governor offers new perspectives on leadership and valuable lessons on the use of power.

Protestant evangelicalism has spread rapidly in Latin America at the same time that foreign corporations have taken hold of economies there. These concurrent developments have led some observers to view this religious movement as a means of melding converts into a disciplined work force for foreign capitalists rather than as a reflection of conscious individual choices made for a variety of personal, as well as economic, reasons.

In this pioneering study, Elizabeth Brusco challenges such assumptions and explores the intra-household motivations for evangelical conversion in Colombia. She shows how the asceticism required of evangelicals (no drinking, smoking, or extramarital sexual relations are allowed) redirects male income back into the household, thereby raising the living standard of women and children. This benefit helps explain the appeal of evangelicalism for women and questions the traditional assumption that organized religion always disadvantages women.

Brusco also demonstrates how evangelicalism appeals to men by offering an alternative to the more dysfunctional aspects of machismo. Case studies add a fascinating human dimension to her findings.

With the challenges this book poses to conventional wisdom about economic, gender, and religious behavior, it will be important reading for a wide audience in anthropology, women’s studies, economics, and religion. For all students of Latin America, it offers thoughtful new perspectives on a major, grass-roots agent of social change.

2024 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Academic Award, The Arab American National Museum

An examination of Arab asylum seekers who feel compelled to package their tales of disenfranchisement and suffering to satisfy a deeply reluctant immigration system.

From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right” kind of victim, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she learned how applicants were pushed to craft specific narratives to satisfy the system’s requirements.

Kanaaneh tells the stories of four Arab asylum seekers who sought protection in the United States on the basis of their gender or sexuality: Saud, who relived painful memories of her circumcision and police harassment in Sudan and then learned to number and sequence these recollections; Fatima, who visited doctors and therapists in order to document years of spousal abuse without over-emphasizing her resulting mental illness; Fadi, who highlighted the homophobic motivations that provoked his arrest and torture in Jordan, all the while sidelining connected issues of class and racism; and Marwa, who showcased her private hardships as a lesbian in a Shiite family in Lebanon and downplayed her environmental activism. The Right Kind of Suffering is a compelling portrait of Arab asylum seekers whose success stories stand in contrast with those whom the system failed.

How can we create high-quality learning environments for children from socially, politically, and economically marginalized groups? How do early childhood programs help to overcome the challenges created by poverty? Seeking to answer these questions, The Starting Line delves into the ups and downs of early education programs serving Latinas/os in Texas, using the state as a window into broader debates about academic opportunity and the changing demographics of the United States.

Immersing readers in the day-to-day activities of Texas's early childhood education programs, Robert Crosnoe illuminates how significant obstacles can stymie the best intentions. Crosnoe pays particular attention to the complex connections among classrooms, schools, families, and communities, as well as the frequently unfolding interplay of educational philosophies. The result is a story highlighting the promises of early childhood education, the perils faced in attempting to fulfill them, and the degree to which Texas stands at the forefront of some larger movements and lags behind in others.

Giving voice to bilingual educators and low-income Latina/o families, this book is a timely exploration of the strengths and needs of what will soon be the largest share of the US child population.

In the global world of the twenty-first century, class boundaries are subtle and permeable, though real nonetheless. Markers of identity, authenticity, and belonging can change with a gesture or a glance, making people feel they do or don't belong in certain places, with certain people, at certain times. In these powerfully written ethnographic stories, Rhoda Halperin maps the boundaries of class by examining three themes: crossing class boundaries, class creativity, and class vulnerability.

In telling these stories, Halperin draws on a wealth of ethnographic experiences in this country and abroad. Her book challenges class stereotypes in ways that touch on universals across cultures and over time.

In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense.

In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed.

The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys—Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan—undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

How building codes shaped material, social, and environmental landscapes in American cities.

Almost every American city contains neighborhoods dominated by wood frame construction—light, cheap, combustible, and requiring the lowest upfront investment of labor and material in the building industry. Known as a Type V (five) construction in the terminology of building codes, these buildings became ubiquitous in the American urban landscape thanks to the abundance of timber, housing affordability aspirations, and the adoption of a uniform code.

In The Type V City, Jeana Ripple examines the social and spatial history of building codes and material patterns in five cities—New York, Tampa, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle—to reframe the stories of America’s building priorities, methods, negotiations, and assumptions. By examining the development of building materials and codes alongside the environmental, social, economic, and political context of each city’s development, Ripple reveals previously overlooked connections between the power structures underpinning regulatory evolution and the impacts that lay just beyond the frame of city builders’ priorities. Handsomely illustrated and informed by both archival research and insights enabled by contemporary data analysis, The Type V City critiques the homogenous construction practices underlying US urbanization and raises pointed questions for future generations of data-driven city planners and architects.

How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.

What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a “case” that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.

This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, on the rhetoric of the legal case, and on novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.

A major reevaluation of collaboration’s role in art since 1968.

The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions.

"The premise of mainstreaming gender is to bring equality concerns into every aspect of policy-making, and this brave book offers a close look at how feminists have taken up the challenge to transform the hidden dynamics of male domination in agricultural policy in Europe. In contrast to the automatic assumption that (neo)liberal policy always works against women’s interests, Prügl demonstrates the potential for feminist ju-jitsu to take advantage of multiple levels of governance to empower women in some circumstances. Although feminists were not always successful, the story of their efforts to remake agricultural policy should encourage activists to look for points of leverage in this and other contested and changing multilevel power systems."
---Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin

"Information on policy development, conflicts about improving the status of farm women, and using rural development policies to foster gender equality is hard to access in English and extremely useful for researchers concerned with the specifics of gender equality policy in the EU."
---Alison Woodward, Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in the gendered process of global restructuring. Elisabeth Prügl succeeds superbly in teasing out the power politics involved in European agricultural policy. Through the lens of a feminist-constructivist approach, she makes visible the multiple mechanisms of gendered power within the state. This very lucid narrative is a milestone in a new generation of feminist theoretical scholarship."
---Brigitte Young, University of Muenster, Germany

Taking West and East Germany as case studies, Elisabeth Prügl shows how European agricultural policy has cemented long-standing gender-based inequalities and how feminists have used liberalization as an opportunity to challenge such inequalities. Through a comparison of the EU’s rural development program known as LEADER as it played out in the Altmark region in the German East and in the Danube/Bavarian Forest region in the West, Prügl provides a close-up view of the power politics involved in government policies and programs.

In identifying mechanisms of power (refusal, co-optation, compromise, normalization, and silencing of difference), Prügl illustrates how these mechanisms operate in arguments over gender relations within the state. Her feminist-constructivist approach to global restructuring as a gendered process brings into view multiple levels of governance and the variety of gender constructions operating in different societies. Ultimately, Prügl offers a new understanding of patriarchy as diverse, contested, and in flux.

Jacket photograph: © iStockphoto.com/Wojtek Kryczka

Their motivation to migrate and to work as erotic dancers can also be understood in the context of a representational system, inaugurated in colonial times, that emphasizes the exoticism of Brazilian womentheir bodies, their skin tone, their sexuality. These stereotypes are the props that Brazilian women use to construct their performances in Manhattan and Queens gentlemen's bars and the language through which they negotiate their relationships to society at large.

Transnational Desires focuses on the lives of nine Brazilian dancers with whom the author, herself a middleclass Brazilian, developed close relationships over the years. Maia examines their social relations both in the bar scene and with family, friends, and lovers outside. She shows that for these women erotic dancing is part of a life trajectory that involves negotiating their social position and life prospects in a fundamentally transnational social universe.

Intellectual freedom is a core value of librarianship, but fighting to keep controversial materials on the shelves can sometimes feel like a lonely battle. And not all censorship controversies involve the public objecting to a book in the collection—libraries are venues for displays and meetings, and sometimes library staff themselves are tempted to preemptively censor a work. Those facing censorship challenges can find support and inspiration in this book, which compiles dozens of stories from library front lines. Edifying and enlightening, this collection

• Tells the stories of librarians who withstood difficult circumstances to champion intellectual freedom
• Touches on prickly issues such as age-appropriateness, some librarians' temptation to preemptively censor, sensitive cultural expressions, and criminality in the library
• Presents case studies of defenses that were unsuccessful, so librarians facing similar challenges can learn from these defeats

There are fewer situations more stressful in a librarian's professional life than being personally confronted with a demand to remove a book from the shelves or not knowing how to respond to other kinds of censorship challenges. Reading this book will help fortify and inform those in the fray.