ABSTRACT
Resilience is one example of agency in psychology focusing on mediating conditions. These mediating conditions need understanding also in spatial systemic terms. This chapter seeks to amplify early Bronfenbrenner’s concerns with concentric structured, nested systems and phenomenology, for Ungar’s extension of resilience to systems based on Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological paradigm. Conceptions of resilience such as ‘bouncing back’ into shape rest on interconnected assumptions regarding space, agency and system blockage, as well as the role of individual phenomenological dimensions. Space is a key bridge between material, symbolic and interpersonal domains of relevance for resilience. Agency in resilience is interpreted in terms of movement between concentric and diametric spatial systems at social and school microsystem levels, as well as for individual phenomenology. Space is not just an object of analysis but an active constituent part of educational and developmental processes pertaining to resilience, as a malleable background-contingent condition for causal trajectories. This framework of spatial-relational agency shifts focus for resilience from bouncing back into shape, towards transition points in space, moving from diametric spaces of splitting.
