Epilogue 1

In this epilogue, Steffen Jensen argues that rather than serving as yet another contribution to a binary debate, the volume invites readers to blur the boundaries between the two. Confinement, he argues, is not limited to prisons but extends to borders, cities, welfare systems, and family networks where coercion and protection often intertwine with and are unevenly distributed along lines of race, class, and gender. Drawing on Povinelli and examples from the volume, Jensen shows how confined lives are collectively negotiated and continually rewritten. In dialogue with Dillema’s study of neoliberal self-making, Schneider’s reading of confinement as literature, and Stuit’s analysis of carceral idylls, he illustrates how agency emerges within constraint. Confinement thus appears not as static enclosure but as a dynamic process that binds violence, inequality, and care, reaffirming the book’s central claim that structure and agency are recursive and relational rather than opposed.