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.

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. He published People don’t fall for it any longer (2025).

Paola Rebughini is Professor of Sociology and currently Director of the PhD program 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, and 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.