Introduction. Recursive composition. The entanglement of structure and agency in a confining world

This introduction reframes the long-standing structure–agency debate through the lens of confinement. Schneider argues that traditional binaries rooted in Western theory obscure the entangled realities of social life. Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and Southern epistemologies, this text proposes that structures and agents co-compose the world in recursive, relational processes. Confinement, often treated as the archetype of structural domination, is reimagined as a dynamic field where agency unfolds within, against, and through constraint. Across diverse sites—from prisons and courts to seas and cities—this collection of deep ethnographies, cultural analyses, and theoretical interventions exposes how confinement is continually produced and contested in everyday life. This introduction thus positions this volume as both a conceptual and methodological intervention, using dialogue and commentary to perform the very relationality it theorizes.