Accessing young people's spatiotemporal construction of agency through joint storytelling

In recent decades, conversations shaped by online platforms have caught the interest of researchers studying everyday interactions of young people Annabell (2023) Fu and Cook (2020) Georgakopoulou (2017) Setty (2023). This article is based on a Snapchat simulation method that was implemented with young people in a project initially intended to understand peer solidarity at spontaneous youth gatherings. In addition, and quite surprisingly, the researcher discovered that the simulation gave access to complex storytelling logic in relation to space, time and agency. Hence, the research question in this article is formulated as follows: How are time and space discursively reworked by multiple tellers to construct agency? By asking this question, the study is in line with Marsh and Spencer (2025) and Bustillos Morales (2025), who highlight the need to challenge linear understandings of time and space in qualitative research.

The simulation method provided an ethically sound way to grasp young people's agency in today's digital world, whilst not intruding on private online conversations. Essentially, Snapchat enables visual and ephemeral communication among friends through messages, as well as image and video sharing. Young people use Snapchat specifically for intimate communication, through the sharing of small moments that convey different feelings, often accompanied by humor (Bayer et al., 2016). While research on Snapchat has largely examined self-presentation in online spaces (see, e.g. Zillich and Wunderlich, 2024; Kühn and Riesmeyer, 2025), surprisingly little attention has been paid to how spatiotemporal configurations emerge within Snapchat's messaging interactions.

Organizing and attending spontaneous youth gatherings is a sensitive research topic since such gatherings are often problematized by adults (see, e.g. Robinson, 2000). To avoid voyeurism, the participants in this study were asked to become storytellers. They were asked to imagine that they were at a youth gathering and pretend that post-it notes were messages sent in a private Snapchat group. This article shows how joint storytelling can be used to refigure ethical dilemmas associated with studies that aim to understand communication on social media platforms.

Georgakopoulou (2017), one of the first researchers to recognize the value of such small stories, highlights the specific story-making practices and functions implemented by users in social media. As individuals share the moment through social media, they make choices to suit their own purposes. This is interesting from the standpoint of agency. In this article, retelling of stories is perceived as a sign of agency in itself. Spencer and Doull (2015) encourage researchers to reflect on how researchers approach agency in a specific study, and to be open to new ways of understanding agency.

Importantly, agency appears in a different light when reflected upon in self-disclosure in hindsight, instead of being contemplated in a small story frame, unfolding moment by moment (Bamberg, 2012). In other words, the small story perspective allows an investigation of spatiotemporal strategies that people perform in unpredictable everyday communication. As Bamberg highlights, understanding spatiotemporal dimensions of agency is important because of the need to broaden the understanding of agency. Similarly, Coffey and Farrugia (2013) find it necessary to rethink the conceptual frameworks that understand agency as an act of resistance in the context of youth studies.

As opposed to big story research, the focus in small story research is on anti-essentialist views, multiplicity and context-specificity, all of which importantly also affect the spatiotemporal aspects of a story (Georgakopolou, 2015). These focal points in small story research help to bring to light spatiotemporal complexities, whereas big stories instead are often told with reflection and hindsight, emphasizing coherent and grand linear timelines. In the context of this article, the small story research perspective is adopted to investigate how agencies are constructed moment by moment in a simulated online conversation.

The article contributes to experimental qualitative studies by availing joint storytelling to grasp how realities are reworked in agency construction. Concepts such as sideshadowing and nested-time are used to scrutinize the making of spatiotemporal agency. In so doing, the article demonstrates how such a methodological approach can offer a detailed insight into the construction of agency and spatiotemporal complexities that complement each other. Georgakopoulou (2003) highlights how dialogism offers exciting opportunities to play with spatiotemporal realities.

The article has five sections. After the introduction, the background outlines the theoretical foundation, discussing spatiotemporal dimensions of agency through a small story approach. The data and methods section details data collection, the choice of simulation, and its impact on analysis. Results focus on one story selected from five. The final section summarizes findings, implications and contributions to qualitative research.

Using a spatiotemporal lens, this study examines how young people express agency in collectively told stories by focusing on lived experience in its broader context (see also Nardi, 2016). Importantly, agency is not equated with self-determination or control. Instead, the study looks at agency in the making, unfolding in time and space. Drawing on Ricoeur (1980), action is framed as a dynamic interplay between the capacity to act and being constrained by the world. Extending this perspective, Coeckelbergh and Reijers (2016) argue that, as humans, we make sense of technologies by means of narratives, but even more importantly, technologies themselves co-constitute narratives by configuring characters and events into a meaningful whole.

As De Fina (2021) points out, time is important in regard to narratives not only because it affects the way events are staged but also because temporality defines tellers' participation in the story. She emphasizes that space is equally important since space allows the unfolding of stories, not only in a geographical sense but also in the context of social spaces. Different social spaces produce different stories and hence different realities in which agencies are constructed. The approach adopted in this article is in line with that of Bamberg (2011), who discusses how the understanding of agency is too often reduced to trying to detect from a story who is in control and hence paradoxes and complexities that also have spatiotemporal dimensions may go undetected.

Ricoeur perceives individuals in the world as “both abandoned and responsible at the same time” (Ricoeur, 1980, p. 176). In other words, even though agency in youth studies is primarily linked to self-determination and understood as power over others and events, in real-life situations, agency is practiced in the midst of chaotic life. As Bamberg (2011) points out, humans engage in meaning-making primarily because it gives them a sense of continuity, but in life, the unfolding of unexpected events reveals the omnipresent chaos over which nobody has control. According to Bamberg, small story research is particularly useful for studying complex spatiotemporal sense-making strategies because the researcher can focus on inconsistencies and contradictions, which may be omitted from stories told with the benefit of hindsight.

In line with Baynham (2003), the narrative actors in this article are not seen as merely produced in time and space, since, more importantly, narrative actors can also be seen as actively reworking time and space to orient their actions to display agency. In everyday settings, spatiotemporal dimensions are open in many directions, as the outcome is unknown. As Ricoeur (1980) points out, humans are accustomed to reading illusionary timelines backward, so when the outcome is known, the narrative, in a sense, starts from the end, which significantly alters the narrative and the understanding of one's agency in the events reflected upon.

Ochs and Capps (2001, p. 83, p. 158) highlight that narratives of personal experiences entail both linear and nonlinear timelines, but the nonlinear timeline may be overlooked in research because of the strong pervasive tendency to arrange events on a linear timeline to achieve a sense of continuity, whereas a nonlinear timeline is open to unpredictability. Hence, using recollection, for example, in face-to-face interviews, means that the ending influences the beginning. Stepping outside linear arrangements is important if we want to understand agency in the complex spatiotemporal context, where outcomes are never known to a person amid unpredictable environments.

Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks (2020) suggest that instead of organizing narratives by ordering events and objects into a timeline, researchers can embrace the multiplicity of perceptions and time clusters. In other words, events can be acknowledged as happening simultaneously, in separate timelines. When time functions as heterogeneity, it is no longer centered on an individual as in psychological time. Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks in fact claim that narratives never belong to a single individual, object or time but are always mixed into flows of difference within human–nonhuman networks. This kind of nested-time can be difficult to grasp because we are so used to using time in a very specific way to organize space, as discussed earlier in this article.

Morson (1996) perceives the human obsession with linear timelines as dangerous because it can lead to deterministic thinking. He uses sideshadowing as a concept that allows alternative realities to be observed. According to him, it is crucial to give space to events that did not take place. This is because once a single line of development is isolated from multiplicity, the alternatives disappear, and this in turn influences our understanding of events and agency. For a determinist, one and only one outcome is possible, and in that sense, time is closed. As Morson points out, for an indeterminist, more than one outcome is possible at some moments. Such complicated action-oriented navigations can be detected in small stories.

Connelly and Clandinin (1990) emphasize that accessing experience requires a gentle, trust-based inquiry, creating conditions for the innate human need to tell stories. The article is in line with Brockmeier's (2009) understanding of the link between human agency and narrative imagination. He argues that narrative imagination is particularly useful for demonstrating human agency and the quest for meaning-making using imaginative narrative resources. As discussed above, small story research has opened a new avenue to investigate spatiotemporal complexities, since big stories have less room for explorations into such messiness and enmeshments. Polkinghorne (1995) emphasizes that narrative inquiry should aim to uncover intentions behind human actions, rather than merely recounting events.

Importantly, social media platforms offer new ways to grasp how everyday experiences are shared with others in a conversational setting Annabell (2023) Georgakopoulou (2017) (Marques and Koven (2017)). Such changes in outlook invite researchers to play with data, to explore what can be done to access realities that do not necessarily follow timelines. In dialogue with Baynham's (2003) reflections on time and space, this article investigates how agency can be understood as constitutive of narrative action. The following two questions are focused on to break down the main research question outlined in the Introduction: (1) How do the tellers position themselves within time and space? (2) How do the tellers construct individual and collective agency from their respective spatiotemporal positions?

As researchers rarely gain access to private messages, they need to make use of other materials in social media (see, e.g. Georgakopoulou, 2017) and use focus groups, interviews and surveys (see, e.g. Fu and Cook, 2020; Setty, 2023). The simulation method introduced in this article allowed the researcher to reconfigure many ethical dilemmas associated with following private groups online. In this context, simulation means creating a space where participants can mimic everyday experiences of online conversations simply by using post-it notes as Snapchat messages.

The data were gathered in 2021 in a school setting in an average-sized provincial Finnish town. The 21 participants were 16–17 years of age. To begin the simulation, the participants were divided into five groups. One group had three to six participants. Each group represented one private Snapchat group and hence each group was given a stack of post-it notes and told that in the simulation, one note represented one message sent to a private Snapchat group. In addition to the post-it notes, each group was given one large sheet of paper where they were instructed to put the chains of post-it notes to keep the messages in the same order in which they were sent.

Next, the participants were asked to imagine a fictional youth gathering using post-it notes as Snapchat messages. The simulation was modelled on the story completion method that uses short story stems designed by the researcher (see, e.g. Clarke et al., 2015). The idea is that the participants continue the story started by the stem. The stems were only a couple of sentences long and came at regular intervals, shown in a slide in front of the class. In the first story stem, the young people began planning a gathering through Snapchat. The second stem placed them at the gathering. In the third stem, the police arrived to stop the event.

The data comprises five stories produced by the five groups that participated in the study, with each story incorporating three story stems. The rate of voluntary participation was high, and during the activities, the youth appeared highly engaged and focused, indicating that they perceived the simulation as worthwhile. Although the method was analogical, it successfully enabled the youth to mimic online and offline spaces in sufficient detail (see also Dwyer, 2017). For the purposes of this article, one story will be considered in detail.

The participants gave informed consent to take part in the study. Before commencing the research, research permits were granted by the town's Bureau of Education and by the principal of the school. No ethical review was requested from the local ethical review committee as the data collection method (joint story completion), or research setting (voluntary participation in a school class setting) did not meet any of the criteria listed by The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity guidelines https://tenk.fi/en/ethical-review/ethical-review-human-sciences (TENK, 2023). A member of a university ethical review committee was consulted beforehand to ensure that the study complies with the Board's ethical principles.

The youth gathering simulation approach was chosen to give the young participants enough autonomous space to display agency. Tilsen (2018), who discusses the importance of narrative approaches to youth work from the perspective of critical practice, emphasizes how externalizing the conversation increases accountability in young individuals. In other words, when the phenomenon is located in the young person for example in face-to-face interviews, the youth may retreat and give answers such as “that's just who I am” (Tilsen, 2018, p. 109). In this study, the lived experience of young people is located within discourses that affect their lives, in this case, the youth gathering, as the study invites young people to take accountability and express agency through joint storytelling (see also Tilsen, 2018, pp. 118–119).

Narrative inquiry has produced many frameworks to help the researcher get the most out of the data. For example, Ollerenshaw and Creswell (2002) propose a three-dimensional framework of interaction, continuity and situation, while Lieblich et al. (1998) use a categorical-content approach to identify recurring themes. This study, however, is guided by the research question: How are time and space discursively reworked by multiple tellers to construct agency? It also applies Barkhuizen's (2008) story–story–story model as an interpretive lens.

Even though the study elicited feelings and actions, the interest was not in the individual per se but in the socio-cultural construction of the individual's motivations. To engage in meaning-making in the stories, the participants had to draw on cultural sense-making resources; the story construction shows the researcher which sociocultural discourses are available to the participants (Clarke et al., 2015). For the purposes of this article, the focus of the analysis is specifically on the reworkings of time and space that participants constructed during the interaction.

Since the messages were written on post-it notes, the young people had to indicate images taken and shared online through writing passages such as “Funny image taken together on the spot”, as the method did not allow sharing of actual images and videos. This is a study limitation. They also had to indicate time passing by writing this on the large sheet of paper provided. The passages, not on post-it notes but on the large sheet of paper to which the post-it notes were attached, are presented in italics by the researcher in the next section of this article that looks at one story in detail.

The findings are organized into four types of agency: individual, collective, alternative, and enmeshed. This categorization draws on Barkhuizen's (2008) narrative framework, which distinguishes between micro-level episodes (story), meso-level trajectories (Story) and macro-level contexts (STORY). While these levels are useful in identifying categories in the results, the emphasis here is on the four types themselves rather than on a detailed analysis using Barkhuizen's framework. The broader cultural and societal implications will be addressed in the discussion and conclusion.

The story shows, in accordance with Ricoeur's (1980) understanding of agency, how the individual acts amid events with uncertain outcomes not originally intended by them. Agency is hence constructed moment by moment when it is not reflected upon but created through different spatiotemporal positions. For the purposes of this article, the extracts from the story start from the beach, where the young people have gathered in the simulation. The conversation begins with trying to locate one another on the beach:

The first extract illustrates how the simulation offered an easy way to create plots out of the moment and involve others in the making of these plots (see, e.g. Georgakopoulou, 2017). Multiple tellers begin to take a perspective on what is happening and to create plots. According to Ricoeur (1980), plots have an important role in locating experience in space and time. From the standpoint of agency, meaningful connections are made through actions that are narrated in the simulation.

Individual and collective agency. As the story continues, the workings of individual and shared time become explicit. The following extract shows the multiple authors juggling multiple agencies in the storyline that inhabit a complex spatiotemporal dimension (see also Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008).

As Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks (2020) point out, instead of organizing narratives by ordering events and objects into a timeline, the researcher can embrace the multiplicity of perceptions, locations and time clusters. Even though the characters in the above extract do not share a location or single action, they share the unfolding moments, and, in those moments, they build a collective agency as members of the same gathering. From a spatiotemporal perspective, a fascinating aspect is that it is impossible to know when the events described in the above extract begin and when they end. The story does not tell the length of the swimming excursion, or when the police arrived and how quickly the location was changed. Yet, collective agency is maintained, as the party stays afloat despite the disruption.

Hence, as illustrated in the earlier passages, time emerges as a network of connections – a multiplicity that resists being traced back to any fixed point (Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks, 2020). In addition, the events unfold within a spiral temporality. For example, when the party is interrupted by authorities, it does not end but moves to a different physical location while continuing online, illustrating how the entanglement of humans and technologies is situated within narrative time (Coeckelbergh and Reijers, 2016). Digital discursive strategies through the mobile phone hold the group together, while spatiotemporal distance taking, and exercising individual agency, is possible (see also Marques and Koven, 2017).

The story then continues with emphasis on the physical, once again altering the perception of time, now focusing on a fleeting moment:

As the extract demonstrates, the sharing of the fleeting moment requires some sort of stepping out, however momentary, from the flow of one's individual experience (Georgakopoulou, 2017) to connect with others and form a collective agency. The characters in the above extract share the beach, which entails natural elements like bushes that provide cover. In addition, they share the exposure to the cold night.

Alternative agency. It becomes apparent that the sharing of individual actions expressing individual agency is a fundamental part of the larger event. An equally interesting spatiotemporal perspective on agency in the data can be accessed through events that do not happen. The tellers actively create new realities which, in turn, bring about new patterns of interactions and opportunities to display agency, as the story continues:

What if the drinks had not been stolen? What would have happened to individual and collective agency in the narrative if more drink had been consumed? These types of questions are relevant in sideshadowing. When Morson's concept of sideshadowing is used “it seems that distinct temporalities are continually competing for each moment of actuality.” (Morson, 1996, p. 118). Sideshadowing means a shadow cast from the side instead of from the future, which leads to competing outcomes that alter individual and collective agency. For instance, consuming more drink could have resulted in altercations with the police. In addition, in the above extract, “a strange guy” enters the scene, leaving multiple options open. The concept of sideshadowing is helpful because it allows the reader of the narrative to sense what could have happened instead of what actually happened.

Enmeshed agency. The posthuman approaches to agency, which promote a reframing of agency as emerging in complex human-nonhuman networks and in intra-actions in the narrative, perceive the individual human as a relative reality rather than a fixed entity (see, e.g. Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks, 2020). The following extract shows how the multiple tellers address non-human elements, such as phones, bushes and cars, which become purposefully enmeshed in their actions:

In the data multiple subjects are both human and non-human, consisting of phones, friends, the beach, bushes, cars, etc. This illustrates how young people mobilize spatiotemporal agency to navigate a narrative landscape composed of personal, collective, technological, and material potentials. Acknowledging non-human agency in the extract challenges the conventional understanding of agency (see, e.g. Haraway, 2016). The beach is enmeshed in the flows of difference that give agencies shape. The beach is almost another actor on the scene. For instance, it provides the bushes actively used by the young people for various purposes. The bushes offer protection and shelter.

Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks (2020) draw attention to non-human and human connections in shared time. Instead of ordering time in a linear manner, they highlight that time can be replaced with various other points of intensity, which here can include the duration of contact in the narrative between the young person and the bush. The young person hiding in the bush is aware that the bush supports their agency by preventing them from getting caught by the police. The bush, on the other hand, has its own past and future. For that moment, the two, the human and non-human, become intertwined (see also Bernaerts et al., 2014).

This article has shed light on the restrictions that a linear understanding of time may impose on qualitative research projects trying to understand agency. An alternative approach to agency construction has been offered here by putting the focus on how the participants rework time and space to their own advantage within the story. The story completion method permitted access to different versions of spatiotemporal realities, hence making agency visible. How the young people in this study simulate communication transcends the platforms themselves (see also Annabell, 2023). The party-goers actively rework their spatiotemporal reality to keep the party going despite the unpredictable circumstances in which the events unfold. In the extracts, non-human agencies are enmeshed with human aspirations, hence they become participators in the unfolding events.

In the data, time consisted of the individual's own time, shared time and object time (Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks, 2020) and agency is constructed in a way that makes visible more possibilities than actualities in the story. The individual storyteller makes meaning and justifies action through connections with other storytellers and objects. The multiple tellers attune their stories to spatiotemporal and interpersonal purposes, sequentially orienting themselves to past, present and future (see also Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008). The findings indicate that ephemeral digital platforms create a hybrid sense of time and space, challenging traditional spatiotemporal boundaries (see also de Souza e Silva et al., 2024).

The method revealed a dynamic that is in dialogue with Ricoeur's (1980) reflections on time and narrative. Creating fictional ad hoc joint stories exposes a dynamic in which, in accordance with Ricoeur's understanding of agency, the individual acts amid events with uncertain outcomes that the individual did not intend. Agency is hence constructed differently when it is not reflected upon but created collectively through fleeting moments moving in time and space. Discovering this dynamic enabled the study to capture a temporal complexity that would have remained hidden in a more traditional approach relying on participants' recollections. As the data illustrate, the relationship between young people and technology evokes individual and collective actions that spiral into greater social opportunities.

As Ochs and Capps (2001, p. 158) point out, timelines are articulated through culturally symbolic forms such as grammar. That is also why social media platforms are interesting because they allow timelines to be articulated outside the established norms. Atkinson and Delamont (2006) highlight that narrative materials are important resources for social analysis as forms of social action. They argue that socially shared conventions and formats of expression should be investigated as social phenomena and hence treating narratives merely from the standpoint of personal experiences does not do justice to their vital role for social sciences. Attempts to achieve a sense of temporal coherence are grounded in society and history and this means that they are not universal, and that they keep evolving. This research made visible:

1. Individual, collective and enmeshed agency

2. What did not happen but could have happened

3. Non-human and human interaction in time and space

The study shows how simulations can be used to reconfigure ethical dilemmas associated with studies aiming to understand communication in social media platforms. Using such methods provides ethically sound ways of trying to grasp agency in today's digital world. The spatiotemporal sphere where youth interact online and offline resists outside observation, making experiences hard to access. The method allowed the researcher to identify the remarkable within the ordinary (Silverman, 2007) while respecting privacy and linking shared experiences to broader contexts (Barkhuizen, 2008). This approach is useful with sensitive research topics, especially when participants are asked to express moral judgements, as is the case in this study.

The article has illustrated a manner of meaning-making that, without the experimental method and analysis, might have remained hidden. In addition, it is important to remember that the young generation will define future societies, even though they are largely excluded from the processes shaping society. Their collective endeavors to act as social agents are often dismissed and paradoxically youth are accused of apathy. Understanding the relationship of technology with agency is important if we want to understand agency in situations that mimic real life, where outcomes are never known to a person amid unpredictable events. The stories managed to capture an evolving spatiotemporal logic, even though a simulation was used.

More broadly, research is needed to determine how such complex spatiotemporal dimensions of agency relate to identity. As discussed in this article, individuals orient their actions from a place that is not fixed, and hence, spatiotemporal dimensions are always open to change. This openness is interesting, particularly when, in certain situations, a person may view themselves as the same person as before, but at the same time as different and new (Bamberg, 2011). The spatiotemporal complexities discussed in this article, combined with such a fluid understanding of self, would be a fruitful area for further research in qualitative studies.

I thank the research group, the research participants and the school personnel for making this research possible.