Full Description
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.
Contents
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
