Rethinking structures and agencies as literature

This chapter reconceptualizes structure–agency as structures ⟲ agencies: recursive, plurivocal entanglements best read as literature rather than as a single script. Ethnographic vignettes from Leipzig and Freetown—imprisonment-seeking among houseless people, storied (often failed) escapes at Pademba Road prison, and the refusal of a medicalized care trajectory in the context of terminal illness—show how small, pragmatic acts operate as annotations to carceral and welfare texts. These gestures do not follow liberal models of resistance; they travel, accrue, and subtly rewrite institutional meaning within a carceral continuum. The chapter shifts from binaries of domination/resistance to a textual model of social life in which institutions endure through citation and performance but are continually revised by many hands. Power, care, confinement, and deserveability appear as genre practices. They are iterative performances whose effects are temporally deferred and unevenly legible across time and position. Methodologically, it advances a practice of entangled reading and co-writing: a recursive, relational approach to ethnography and theory that acknowledges its own embeddedness in the social and conceptual worlds it seeks to understand. It works from within the uncertainties, annotations, and reverberations of collaborative research and treats research materials, conditions, institutions, and canons as active sites where meaning emerges through context, positionality, and encounter. Attuning to these dispersed edits moves analysis beyond the structure/agency binary toward cumulative, recursive editing of the shared social text that we inherit, inhabit, and remake.