Temporalities of meaning making

Abstract Presenting two cases of rural communities in Uganda and China, this study explores time-space relations in narrative productions of place and identity. Drawing on walking interviews with youth in these communities conducted as part of a larger sociolinguistic research project on digital storytelling about local places, the notion of chronotopes is used as theoretical lens to understand how narratives of place are embedded in multiple scales and time-spaces of rurality and development. Findings show how relations between time-space are constructed in the talk of the youth in different ways, for example, either laminated to produce new hybrid spaces and identities or demarcated to reinforce distinctions between old/new, rural/urban. We discuss how a chronotopic lens can be used to understand sociolinguistics of mobility from a local perspective by illuminating the relations between the histories of places in relation to trajectories of change and development.