Living temporalities: Ecological chronotopes in children’s augmented storying

Kristiina Kumpulainen

How is time experienced in children’s encounters with ecological worlds? This piece develops the concept of ecological chronotopes to examine how ecological processes organise narrative time in children’s storying practices. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the chronotope—the intrinsic connectedness of time and space in narrative—I explore how children’s narrative practices make perceptible the temporal rhythms already unfolding within ecological settings. Ecological chronotopes foreground how lived temporalities emerge through encounters with ecological processes such as seasonality, decay, regeneration, and multispecies interdependence.

The argument develops in dialogue with my ongoing research in Finland and Canada with children aged 6–8 years and their teachers, focusing on ecological imagination through augmented storying with local environments (see, e.g. Kumpulainen et al., 2023). I use the term augmented storying to refer to place-responsive narrative practices in which children layer digital elements onto material environments. Through these practices, children compose stories that do not simply represent ecological settings and children’s cultural worlds but unfold within their temporal rhythms. Ecological chronotopes thus refer to narrative–temporal configurations in which ecological processes organise lived time and render alternative temporalities experientially available.

Recent multispecies research has drawn attention to ontological instability in children’s encounters with more-than-human others, including what has been described as “flickering ontologies” (Renshaw et al., 2024), where the boundaries between the real and the possible momentarily blur. Building on this insight, I shift the analytic focus toward the temporal–spatial conditions through which such instability becomes structured and experienced. Ecological chronotopes direct attention to how narrative encounters with ecological processes intensify temporal awareness and open imaginative engagements with multiple temporal registers.

From this perspective, ecological chronotopes are not only narrative structures but also affective and material fields in which ecological temporalities become experientially intensified. Through them, processes such as duration, interruption, continuity, and transformation become perceptible in children’s encounters with ecological worlds. Ecological settings, whether forests, shorelines, urban wetlands, or school grounds, articulate temporal patterns that exceed linear progression and invite cyclical, recursive, and layered experiences of becoming. In this sense, ecological worlds do not merely host stories; they participate in teaching time.

This orientation resonates with Adam’s (1998) notion of “timescapes_”_, where temporality is rhythmic and embedded within ecological processes, and with Barad’s (2007) account of temporality as emergent through intra-action. Perspectives on more-than-human temporalities further illuminate this shift. Ingold (2011) conceptualises environments as ongoing processes of growth and correspondence, Haraway (2016) foregrounds “thickened” presents shaped by multispecies entanglement, and Tsing (2021) attends to precarious temporalities unfolding within damaged landscapes. Extending these perspectives, ecological chronotopes foreground how environments generate temporal orientations that children encounter and inhabit.

Childhood studies have long critiqued developmental models that position children primarily within future-oriented trajectories (Lee, 2001; Prout, 2004). Qvortrup (1994) further highlights how institutional temporalities structure generational relations. Ecological chronotopes offer a complementary perspective by situating children within broader ecological times that precede and exceed developmental timelines. In such contexts, children are not simply moving toward the future but are dwelling within layered temporalities shaped by ecological processes.

My research shows how augmented storying reveals the ways ecological settings reorganise narrative time. Within these practices, past ecological traces, present encounters, and imagined futures coexist in the same storied moments. As children move through environments and layer digital narratives onto material landscapes, ecological rhythms become perceptible. Digital mediation thus amplifies awareness of the layered temporalities already unfolding within ecological worlds.

Conceptually, ecological chronotopes contribute to theorizing temporality in childhood by decentring human developmental time and foregrounding ecological temporalities as formative. They provide an analytic lens for examining how environments participate in structuring lived time and how narrative mediates this encounter. Temporality, in this view, is neither solely imposed by institutions nor produced by individuals; rather, it emerges within ecological relations and is articulated through narrative practice.

In times marked by environmental precarity, attending to ecological chronotopes opens new possibilities for understanding how lived time is shaped by and responsive to more-than-human temporalities. By extending chronotopic theory beyond literary analysis into environmental and childhood literacy research, it can be shown how ecological processes themselves organise narrative time and how children’s storying practices render these temporal relations perceptible.