Agency Beyond Confinement

Rethinking the Relationship Between Agency and Structure in the Contemporary World
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-13427-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Advances in Sociology

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, the 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 —written, inhabited, and rewritten by those it seeks to contain.

Bringing together case studies from Europe, Latin America, and Africa, the 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.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schneider, Luisa T

Rebughini, Paola

Dillema, Robbert

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction. Recursive Composition. The Entanglement of Structure and Agency in a Confining World; Prelude. Out of Words; 1. Metamorphosis of the agency/structure debate; 2. Rethinking Structures and Agencies as Literature; 3. The expansion and multiplication of prisoner governance schemes in Latin American prisons. Towards an explanation; 4. Ghosts in the machine? Applying sonic theory to structure and agency; 5. Prison, Home, Garden: Carceral Idylls and (Re)Thinking Detention in Robert Glas’ Justice Beyond Revenge. Recalling Louk Hulsman (2024); 6. Negotiating power: structure and agency in Nepalese prisons’ system of inmate co-governance; 7. Neither rebels, nor ‘good boys.’ Anticipation Games, Professional Ethics and Prosecutorial Discretion in West Africa’s Special Courts; 8. Engaging the Prison as Intention, Effect, and Function. On the Incommensurability and Ethics of Prison Research; 9. Adding volume and technological flesh to the Mediterranean border zone: The Space-Eye-project as gateway to EU aerial surveillance infrastructures; 10. Dreams and aspirations at the calisthenics court: differentiating agency from ideology with young adults in Amsterdam’s Bijlmer district; Epilogue 1: Agency and Confined Lives; Epilogue 2: Thoughts on Something-to-be-done: Embracing the Otherwise Toward Abolitionist Futures

Über Autor(innen)

Luisa T. Schneider is an anthropologist whose work focuses on intimacy, violence, law, and everyday ethics. She is Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands and a Research Partner at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research in Europe and West Africa, her work examines how carceral abandonment shapes personal relationships and institutional practices. Her recent publications include Love and Violence in Sierra Leone (2025), Let Me Take a Vacation in Prison Before the Streets Kill Me! (2021), and Sexual Violence During Research (2020).

Robbert Dillema is completing his PhD in Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. He works on urban segregation in neoliberal welfare states, particularly the so-dubbed participatory state of the Netherlands. There, he conducts ethnographic research with young adults and their support networks in Southeast Amsterdam. His research engages with the phenomenology, ideo-pedagogy and political economy of urban disenfranchisement.

Paola Rebughini is Professor of Sociology and currently Director of the PhD programme in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research at the University of Milan, Italy. Her main fields of expertise are Social and cultural theory, Sociology of youth, Cultural pluralism, Agency in everyday practices. She is the author of more than 150 publications, including: Framing Social Theory (2022) eds. with E. Colombo; Sociology of difference: Gender, Culture, Nature (2022) in Italian. Youth and the Politics of the Present (2019) eds. with E. Colombo.