Objective: In recent years, the ‘Anthropocene’ has become a gathering term to address constitutive concerns regarding Earth system epochal change across a complex and entangled web of material, philosophical, scientific, ethical, and political significances. At the same time, children of the Anthropocene remain relative marginalized from ongoing discussions. Importantly, there is little recognition of children’s perspectives or capacity to be agents of change and future-making, apart from activist youth. This study responds to this research gap by investigating educational approaches that position children into the roles of investigators, authors, and change agents rather than mere receivers of adult information and advice about the Anthropocene. It does so by focusing on time-space narratives of children’s ecological imagination through a novel mobile augmented story-crafting method (Kumpulainen et al., 2023). Theoretical framework: Our inquiry is grounded on posthuman scholarship informed by ‘common worlds’ (Haraway, 2008, 2016), new materialism (Barad, 2003, 2007), and nomadic philosophies (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987). Posthuman theorizing helps us generate knowledge on how children of the Anthropocene narrate their relations with the human and more-than-human world across time and space and the performative power of these narratives. Methodology: Our methodological choices draw on post-qualitative approaches that allow us to attend to the time-space contexts of children’s ecological imagination through the mutual becoming of materialities, bodies, and atmospheres. Post-qualitative methodologies offer us creative means to study complex relational entanglements of human and nonhuman encounters shedding light on the contextual processes, events, and relationships (Byman, et al., 2023; Kumpulainen, et al., 2023; Renlund, et al., 2023). Data sources: Our inquiry draws on empirical research material generated together with children (aged 7 to 9 years old) and their teachers in a Finnish elementary school by means of videos, observational field notes, children’s narrations of their stories, interviews, and children’s story artefacts. Discussion: Our research results evidence the children’s narratives attuning into complex relational entanglements of affective, embodied, sensual, symbolic, and moral intensities of the Anthropocene that also question human exceptionalism. The narratives were entangled with the children’s past experiences and cultural knowledge, ongoing involvement and yet-to-accomplished goals, as well as hopes, worries and concerns. The children imagined possible futures that called for change and action, demonstrating relational agency and care. In all, our research provides insights into the importance of recognizing children of the Anthropocene as important stakeholders whose perspectives can enrich our relational imagining and acting for the future of the planet.

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