Agency Beyond Confinement: Rethinking the Relationship Between Agency and Structure in the Contemporary World

What does it mean to be confined and what forms of life, resistance, and care emerge in response? Agency Beyond Confinement rethinks the social life of confinement by refusing binaries: structure vs. agency, reform vs. resistance, care vs. control. Across prisons, homes, gardens, seas, and cities, this volume explores how material, affective, and institutional confinement is shaped and reshaped through recursive processes of structure and agency. It argues that confinement appears not as total enclosure, but as a genre of design, narration, abandonment, and control that is written, inhabited, and rewritten by those it seeks to contain. Bringing together case studies from Europe, Latin America, and Africa, this volume features an interdisciplinary group of scholars who refuse academic silos. Across methods, themes, and theoretical lineages, they examine how confinement takes shape, how it can be re-theorized, and how it might be undone. As such this book is essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in anthropology, carceral studies, cultural studies, critical legal theory, and related fields seeking to understand—and unmake—the conditions of confinement today.