ABSTRACT
Constructivist agency as capacity to choose between alternatives relies upon intentionality and is a dominant view of agency in psychology. Challenge to this view is well established, as even when people choose, their choices are based on criteria which are themselves culturally conditioned, in an infinite regress of criteria for criteria, all still swamped by cultural forces. The mediating spaces between the individual and the surrounding culture invite diametric spaces of assumed separation as one option, together with an assumed connection in terms of a concentric spatial relation that still retains a distinction between the individual and environmental forces. A monistic reduction of the individual to sheer socio-historical cultural conditioning, as an empty space upon which the culture inscribes itself, requires challenge through experience as a patterned space. This chapter proposes a spatial systemic understanding of agency in terms of movement between concentric and diametric spatial systems at a range of diverse system levels. In doing so, it reconstructs a range of problems of agency in spatial systemic terms to challenge system exclusion, through an agency that goes beyond mere indeterminism. In doing so, it relates experience to wider systemic dimensions, a question not directly asked by Bronfenbrenner.
