Geographies of the seasons

Abstract

Seasonal qualities are found in everyday practices, as social and cultural customs move in and out of sync with environmental cues. Yet notions of seasonality cannot be decoupled from colonial power, capitalistic logics, and the lineage of Western sciences that long disregarded a wealth of place-based knowledges. At the same time, increasingly unseasonable events strain the assumptions of a stable climate and dependable seasonal rhythms, as planetary systems continue to falter. An assumed presence of the seasons has surfaced in geographical explorations of weather. On the other hand, there are omissions of how seasonality is felt and negotiation by those on the margins, especially beyond the meteorological context. The article traces a burgeoning geography of the seasons, which runs through social, political, ecological, and more-than-human concerns.

Introduction

‘The seasons’ are broadly understood as a temporal framing device for meteorological and climate conditions that denote specific periods of activity or mobility and are entangled with rhythmic, place-based cycles (Barry, 2025; Edensor, 2012; Golinski, 2003; Orlove, 2021). Seasonal relations form in and through place. This might be found in the food we eat, the growth of plants, the movements of tides and our perceptions of stars, the migrations of humans and animals, or the festive periods and local knowledges that develop via seasonal temporalities. However, seasonality – as a distinctive quality, temporality, and affective in its relations (Barry, 2025) – has largely been a backdrop in geographical research.

Seasonal characteristics slip in and out of attention, fitting into the mundanity of daily consumption, or at times striking with a punch when it exceeds expectations. Recently, I found myself contemplating the extremes of seasonal affects, as I stared intently at a shelf full of blackberries and raspberries in a supermarket. A bright ‘in season’ sign claimed these berries were just $2.99 a punnet. I wondered, is it really berry season? Surely, I thought to myself, it can’t be right now, in this mid-30 degree Celsius scorching summer weather in the sub-tropical city where I live. I looked closer at the carton, underneath a logo of a multinational berry brand, and I read: ‘Proudly Tasmanian Grown!’ For reference, Tasmania (Lutruwita) is an island state in Australia roughly 2500 km south of me. This ‘season’ of berries as actually quite distant, yet I’ve been lulled into buying fresh produce that emboldens some kind of romanticised localism that muddies the multinational branding. I still bought the berries. As I walked home, rolling this sense of betrayal of seasonality around in my head, alerts from news apps on my phone told me that communities in the north of the country were being evacuated due to unprecedented flooding, and in the south of Australia, people were being evacuated from catastrophic bushfires in record-breaking 49 degree Celsius heat. Again, the seasons pivoted in my mind, and I had the overwhelming sense of how rapidly seasonal geographies are shifting. This example of my own grappling with the slippery temporal bracketing of seasonal concerns highlights the taken-for-granted aspects of seasons, which ebb and flow in ecological rhythms, planetary cycles, political decisions, and the mundanity of daily life. These observations from Australia, like many places around the world, show a recalibration (and maybe an inevitable acceptance) of seasonality is taking place. This paper explores the myriad of geographies of the seasons, advocating that increased attention should be given to this often unremarked and overlooked conceptual, temporal, and spatial framing.

Seasonality is distinct from weather (as meteorological manifestations) and on a different spatial and temporal register to climate (encompassing global heating, but also the notion of a localised micro-climate of meteorological affects). Recent years have seen a broader scope of seasons and seasonality explored in scholarship, encompassing (but not limited to) meteorological phenomena, temporal practices, and human and more-than-human relations. Amidst the flourishing of geographies of the weather that attend to the localised, nuanced experiences of climate and meteorology (e.g. Edensor et al., 2021; Endfield, 2019; Wright, 2024; Wright and Tofa, 2021), there are few examples in geographical scholarship that have directly encountered seasonality in and of itself as an overarching temporal, spatial, and place-based conceptual framework.

Crucially, notions of seasonality cannot be easily decoupled from colonial roots and power. Seasonal qualities have an assumed presence and timing, partly due to their inscription into Westernised timekeeping and naming conventions such as the Eurocentric ‘four seasons’ model and Gregorian calendar (Edensor, 2012; Golinski, 2003; Orlove, 2021). As a temporal mechanism, seasonal transitions are useful in attuning to place via rhythm (Edensor, 2020; Edensor, Head and Kothari, 2019), yet maintain strong ties to colonial and Western geopolitics that ‘tame’ places, peoples, and land (Furuhata, 2022; Grossman, 2023; Wright, 2024). Yet seasons manifest in more mundane or taken-for-granted ways. Examples include the ‘winter blues’ Bodden et al., 2024a), food grown out of season (Barry, House and Ross, 2025; Waitt and Phillips, 2016), or in the ways in which individuals and communities prepare for seasonal periods such as storm season, lunar new year, the summer break, or the annual agricultural show. These are inherently place-based practices of seasonality (Gough et al., 2026) that respond to landscape and culture (Terkenli, 2005) and which draw relations across local, regional, and even hemispheric scales. Seasonal conditions connect us to jet streams, lunar cycles, and more (Noon and De Napoli, 2022; Peters, 2021), through much longer timeframes than a weather forecast.

This article explores the conceptual framing of seasonality, which offers geographers a fresh avenue of inquiry that binds social, cultural, ecological, and political concerns around place, practices, and more-than-human relations. The article unfolds as follows. The following section identifies snippets of seasonality in geographical writing on weather, to show that the seasons are frequently an assumed presence. Next, I show how there is a distinct absenting of the seasons within scholarship across many contexts, in line with the under-examination of marginalised bodies and their experiences. The following section turns to the temporal aspects of seasonality and the colonial legacies that seasonality grapples with. Following this, I explore the more-than-human relations that guide a growing understanding of seasonality. I conclude by looking ahead to how seasonality might be taken up as a way to resist colonial legacies and expand on other forms of agency and animacy in an increasingly unseasonable or even an ‘aseasonal’ future.

Presencing seasonal assumptions

A large portion of scholarship engages with specific meteorological conditions within an anticipated seasonal time frame. In simple terms, this might mean how people anticipate and respond to heat during summer (Verkat, 2025), or how one weathers the cold depths of winter (Bodden et al., 2024b). The assumed or expected seasonal framing temporally structures annual rhythms while being spatially specific, that is, at the local, regional, or hemispheric scale. Meteorological conditions are often presumed and linked to a ‘social “arrival”’ of seasonal periods (Hitchings, 2010: 298), which render the presence of a typical season. Each specific meteorological phenomenon becomes anchored in a socio-cultural expectation of which season it should be present within. Adamson and Rapson (2024) describe this informal knowledge as a kind of ‘weather heritage’ that accumulates in place. While connected to larger climate trends and knowledge (Hulme, 2009), such localised assumptions of when to anticipate certain weather within a specific season are passed on through collective memories and experiences. The act of noticing and subsequently practicing in relation to the rhythms of the meteorological seasons ‘are themselves important heritage markers that shape collective memory within particular communities’ (Adamson and Rapson, 2024: 2).

Seasonal periods and their respective weather, as Endfield describes, have ‘come to be understood and articulated through different narrative forms and produced and reproduced’ (2019: 5). Obvious examples of anticipated seasonal phenomena are found in geographical accounts of natural disasters which, until only recently, have tended to occur in the expected seasonal period (until recent years of unprecedented extremes). Social researchers have studied these intense seasonal phenomena through specific meteorological contexts, such as fires during hot summer months (Haynes et al., 2021), snowfall during protracted winters (Markkula et al., 2024a), or hurricanes and storms in the Atlantic summer-to-autumn period (Sodero, 2022). Describing the origins of seasonality, Golinski shows where ‘[t]raditional maxims and proverbs – known to everyone – gave rules for predicting the weather for the immediate future or for the whole season ahead’ (2003: 31). Such cultural and local law around weather conditions and their timing and placing have been integral to passing on meteorological and climate knowledges, stretching far back – and crucially, predating the Gregorian calendar – in community knowledges of place (Diaconu, 2024; Markkula et al., 2024b). Yet this kind of presencing of the seasons are, inconsequently, often underplayed as manoeuvres or byproducts of weather and climate, not as a distinctive actant in and of itself. The point is that there has been an assumed presence of meteorological events within typical seasons that has been socially and culturally fortified. Communities and governments plan for specific intensities, such as in advice to prepare for ‘haze season’ (Liu et al., 2025) or the allergenic ‘pollen season’ (Calvillo, 2023) but such routine annual cycles of seasonal intensities are now being undone by global heating.

Part of the issue may be an assumed association that comes into play via acclimatisation to specific seasonal characteristics. Senses may dull as the seasons become a more habitual, mundane experience for locals who live for long periods in one place. While some places become known for ‘particular types of “normal” weather’ (Endfield, 2019: 6), a kind of seasonal baseline of expectations has become socially and culturally entrenched through place-based anecdotes and knowledges (Diaconu, 2022). What one location might consider as ‘fine’ weather can be vastly different across regions and latitudes. This is especially pronounced in areas that are reputed for their pronounced micro-climate or intensive seasons conditions. Speaking of the tropical city of Darwin, Larrakia Country in northern Australia, de Vet's exploration of ‘acclimatization’ to the sweltering heat and high humidity results in a minimising of ‘discomfort’ and allows participants to ‘relish tropical outdoor lifestyles’ (2017: 144). There are a plethora of studies exploring how people negotiate the intensity of experiencing seasonal phenomena, through examples of labour and work (Adams-Hutcheson, 2019; Cullen, 2021; Barry, 2025), Indigenous practices and cultural traditions (Bawaka Country et al., 2022; Markkula et al., 2024b; Wright and Tofa, 2021), commuting (Bissell, 2018; Hitchings, 2010), exercising and leisure activities (Thorpe, 2017), or in racialized and marginalised communities (Hamstead, 2024; Robinson, 2025; Robertson et al., 2024; Venkat, 2025). In these examples, porous bodies follow the expected seasonal conditions and through experience they attempt to adapt and acclimatise – with or without technological and material aids – in order to weather intense seasonal periods.

Perception and presencing of the seasons become more pronounced in certain circumstances, such as in the aging body (Hitchings and Day, 2011; Meijering et al., 2024), or in mobility to different micro-climates and landscapes (Terkenli, 2005). But while measures to condition oneself may dull the immediate registers of seasonality for those situated indoors, the resulting external diffusion of these conditioning technologies only exacerbates inequalities elsewhere (Robinson, 2025). Hitchings described actions to acclimatise to what ‘might be called the “seasonal signal” seems to be weakening’ – at least in the Western contexts – due to people ‘spending increasing amounts of our time within climatically controlled indoor environments’ (2011: 283). In this manner, seasonal intensities are made more present in the uneven distribution of their socialised, racialized, and economic effects.

The way that people grapple with and change their assumptions about seasons – especially as seasonal rhythms become increasingly unseasonable in their presence (Barry, 2025) – has been explored in recent geographies of the thermal (Hamstead, 2024; Robinson, 2025), of light and darkness (Bodden et al., 2024b; Edensor, 2020), and in everyday practices and preparations (Duffy et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2025) for seasonal extremes. This assumed presence of seasonality as an overarching framing that is both spatially specific (at the local or regional scale) and temporally constrained (in a cyclical or rhythmic scheduling, such as summer, autumn, winter, or ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ season). However, I suggest this has created an inadvertent tension point. Simultaneously, there is a distinctive absence of the seasons in discussion, where the immediacy of weather takes centre stage and seasonal qualities are a byproduct or backdrop. Such omittances tend to align with more marginalised experiences of the ‘weather world’ (Ingold, 2010), in which the normative or dominant social narratives of what a ‘good season’ might look like, might not be equally felt, coped with, or mitigated.

Absenting of seasonal experiences

In one sense, the assumed presence of seasonal qualities relies on unremarked or unquestioned social and cultural assumptions, which geographers have distinctly recognised in the aforementioned examples. On the other hand, the absence of seasonality is entwined with discussions of justice and power, which weave in and out of meteorological contexts. There are many domains where seasonality has been distinctively absent in scholarship. In regions where seasonal transitions are less pronounced meteorologically, such as close to the equator, the movement of just a few degrees on the thermometer and storms spread out across the year, necessitates other ways to discern seasonal change (Orlove, 2021). Such presumed absences of the seasons are based on narratives of empire and power which overtly simplified and rejected other cosmologies in favour of Western scientific accounts (Grossman, 2023; Wright and Tofa, 2021). Settler-colonial observations of meteorological data quick accumulated into large data sets, transforming observations of a settler's ‘environmental knowledge across space and time’ (Grossman, 2023: 40) into larger data sets based on colonial reference points for expected climatic and seasonal parameters.

Seasonality has also been largely absent in health and wellbeing geographies, as Bodden et al. (2024) illustrate in their investigation of ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’. While most people may transition between seasons with little effort, their research highlights how seasonal conditions impact in uneven ways on psycho-social relations. Social consensus of what a ‘good season’ elicits and how seasonal weather should be experienced (and celebrated or bemoaned) is deeply rooted in ableist, gendered, and racialized narratives. The able-bodied and affluent are far best placed to cope with stresses from heat or exposure to the elements (Robertson et al., 2024; Sodero, 2022), to be able to condition their personal climates (Hitchings and Day, 2011; Hitchings, 2010), or indeed have the material and economic capacity to shelter in place (Adey, 2024). Acknowledging the diversity and differences in how bodies engage with, endure, or react to seasonality is still relatively marginalised in scholarship.

Prolonged seasons of heat or cold tend to affect an aged body more (Hitchings and Day, 2011; Robertson et al., 2024; Wright, 2024), elongated wet or snow seasons are more pronounced for those needing assistance in mobility (Waitt et al., 2024), while the sensorial intensity of some elemental conditions can be an overwhelming factor for neurodivergent folk (Judge, 2018; Parr, 2025). The intensity of seasonal periods affects bodies differently in their sensory capacity to process and respond (Judge, 2018). Aged bodies, as they transition through the ‘seasons of life’, often tailor activity choices around seasonal periods that they can endure more easily. Meijering et al.'s (2024) careful exploration of elder person's mobilities illustrate the embodied geographies that are spatially and temporally specific to seasons, such as choices to garden or leisure outdoors in temperate springtime, or how they may negotiate temperature and heating through winter (Hitchings and Day, 2011). Similarly, menopausal bodies feel atmospheres differently (Wright, 2024), as corporeal and sensory shifts occur with age. Gender is a lens through which seasonality could be explored in much more depth, with regard to heat stress and ailments, as Wright hints at (2024). The socialisation of seasons as ‘festive’ or ‘holiday’ periods could also be interrogated further in terms of gendered, ageist, and racialized assumptions. For instance, there are seasonal increases in domestic violence in warmer periods, holidays, or the ‘finals season’ of many sports (Summerell and Moeck, 2024). While there is critical scholarship emerging from geographers working to present the past absences of Othered bodies, I stress here that more work on these marginalised experiences would go far in advancing less ableist commentary on the phenomenological benefits of weather within and beyond geographical research (Bell et al., 2019; Meijering et al., 2024). These snippets of scholarship highlight the normative framing of seasonal experiences, which dominate banter around ‘good weather’ and a ‘good season’.

There is much more examination required of how seasonality is entangled with growing eco-anxiety, let alone the grief and trauma suffered from lived-experiences of disaster (Head, 2016). Similarly, intensive seasonal conditions such as prolonged heat or cold dictate the ability of vulnerable populations to mitigate or adapt, and are clearly linked to legacies of colonial violence and racial segregation (Hamstead, 2024; Robinson, 2025). Seasons produce injustices that ‘are the pronounced impact’ on people and communities that are ‘disproportionately exposed to the chancing climate’ (Dimick, 2024: 11). It is not merely about an absence of scholarship that focuses on mitigation strategies or adaptation practices, but about how experiences of a diversity of bodies, locations, and contexts can offer insight into how seasonal geographies become discussed, shared, used, and manipulated in day-to-day life. Cocooning oneself indoors for the winter might be reassuring for some (Hitchings, 2010), but simply retreating indoors can exacerbate tensions or render absent networks, freedoms, or support for others (Verkat, 2025). The spatial proximities matter in how familial or domestic dynamics take shape during seasonal periods, and geographers are well placed to uncover these practices and experiences through a seasonal lens.

Colonial temporalities

Temporal aspects of the seasons have been written about with great consideration (see Golinski, 2003; Orlove, 2021; Strauss and Orlove, 2003), although surprisingly, these writings are relatively scarce. In their 2003 collection, Strauss and Orlove interrogate weather and climate through days, years, and generations. Seasonal aspects, in their terms, act as a ‘time interval’ that commands attention (2003: 8). While I am conscious not to retrace the vast historical lineage of the seasons (forementioned authors have done this well), there are notable ways that contemporary practices of seasonality are still embedded in colonial legacies. Western renderings of the seasons emerged with the Gregorian calendar, in which expectations of productivity and labour during specific rigid periods were an exertion of control over lower classes (Golinski, 2003). What Golinski terms as a ‘uniform measure of time’ (2003: 23) became a smoothening of seasonal variables based on the British four-season notion of climatic periods. Expanded with empire and into the colonies, the specific temporal bracketing of the seasons sought to temper foreign climates and peoples (Grossman, 2023; Wright and Tofa, 2021).

Settler-colonial attempts to secure the seasons in exotified locales were effective in their violence and erasure of peoples and knowledges that differed from their worldview of nature and land (Wright and Tofa, 2021). More specifically, the segregation that occurred in the choice of settlement regions sought to reserve the ideal and temperate vistas and micro-climates for upper-classes, while the less-desirable or more exposed areas were demarcated for everyone else, with more marginal groups pushed further and further out. Contemporary suburban sprawl still functions in this way in cities around the world, where heat pockets or absence of airflow or riverine proximity exacerbate seasonal intensities for local residents (Robinson, 2025; Venkat, 2025). Historically, the proximity of worker housing the sites of work that are seasonally dependent (such as the plantation, the farm, the kiln, the mine) results in more pronounced seasons to weather for labouring bodies (Venkat, 2025). Racialized divisions of seasonal expectations in labour still exist today, especially in manual, low-paid employment that relies on racialized hierarchies or migrant cohorts (Cullen, 2021; Robinson, 2025; Venkat, 2025). Such practices ingrain seasonal temporalities within colonial legacies of class, race, and control.

Imperial expansions and settlement attempted to control the climate, in an attempt to universalise governance based on geopolitical powers (Furuhata, 2022). Invasions and land dispossessions sought to simply ‘fix a date in the calendar’ (Fletcher in Cumptsone et al., 2022: 61), by way of averaging seasonal characteristics and therefore engineering the illusions of fertile landscapes and productivity. The legacies remain today, with global circuits of labour, commodities, and finance reflecting an abstracted and highly mobile seasonality bolstered by trade winds and ocean currents. Recent scholarship has explicated the hangover of disciplinary tendencies that sought to universalise climate in science (de Vet, 2017; Grossman, 2023; Wright and Tofa, 2021). Descriptions of meteorological conditions and climatic circulations leave this ‘global’ notion of the seasons in a hazy temporal framing. In Wright and Tofa's exploration (2021), they show that meteorology as a discipline laboriously produced ‘strict division[s] between people and their environments’ (2021: 1126). This standardisation ‘provides a sense of governability, control, and a shared universal dilemma’ (de Vet, 2017: 141) of how to reckon with unfamiliar or ‘foreign’ seasons and conditions. Whereas in cultures where peoples and the environment are more closely linked through practices, beliefs, and cosmology, ‘livelihoods and cultures depend on seasonal cycles’ (Markkula et al., 2024a: 1203) and connection to place is jeopardised through colonial violence and the indirect consequences of climate change. Such a ‘domestication of nature’ is rooted in territorial control (Furuhata, 2022: 35) and continues to present a techno-militarised control of weather, climate, and seasons.

Unsurprisingly, such universalising notions of seasonality still favours a northern hemispheric orientation. While the north and south may invert seasonal cycles, it is important to remember that larger planetary temporalities are at play. Cultural astronomer Hamacher explains:

As the Earth rotates from west to east, celestial objects appear to move from east to west, a term western astronomers call diurnal motion. The movements of the Sun serve as a timepiece that functions on different scales: daily, seasonally and annually. This impacts nearly every aspect of life. It guides the growth of plants and the behaviour of animals, marks the changing seasons and defines the length of a day. (2022: 33)

When seasonal conditions differ from expectations or do not fit within a normative temporal expectancy, greater attention is drawn to seasonal rhythms. For instance, those writing and working in the southern hemisphere will understand the frustration of having to spell out the ‘austral summer’ in international settings, as if apologising for a discordant temporal referent. In many locations, where the ill-fitting four-season framing is a legacy of colonial control, the localised social and cultural referents to place are far more attuned to meteorological relations. For instance, the seasons in many tropical places are distinctively routinised as the elongated ‘wet season’ or ‘dry season’ (de Vet, 2017), where monsoonal conditions influence the rhythms and practices of labour, leisure, and dwelling (Bremner et al., 2022; Cullen, 2021). In more recent times, places reputed for seasonal activities (think of tropical beaches or snow-capped mountains) are increasingly confronted with unseasonable weather (Steiger et al., 2024), throwing seasonal industries into chaos and decline. For First Nations peoples across the Arctic, where anthropogenic climate change is having dramatic impacts on seasonal temperatures, snow, and ice coverage, the absence of traditional seasonal rhythms is having a dramatic impact on how communities continue to practice place-based traditional cultural activities (Markkula et al., 2024b).

In other contexts, a changing periodic season of a more temperate climate may provide avenues for conquest or extractive practices that were previously unfathomable at certain times of the year (think of Trump's desires for control of the Arctic seas). Such dazzling conquests of atmospheric control are found in industrial and colonial expansion, particularly in the guise of primary production industries and extractive, carbon-intensive societies. Indeed, Rachel Carslon's forewarnings of a ‘silent spring’ (1962) highlight how rhythmic and dependable (Western) human society has assumed seasonal periods to be. Researchers have described the devastation caused by anthropocentric forces, where geopolitics combine with ‘climate engineering’ to produce cold wars (Furuhata, 2022), ‘nuclear winters’, or other ways that impress and fundamentally alter seasonal rhythms that livelihoods depend on. More recently, Hamstead (2024) has described this as ‘thermal insecurity’, where the ability for individuals to regulate extreme heat or cold becomes exacerbated in specific locales. Such places often have a long lineage of deliberate colonial spatial exclusion or segregation, where vulnerabilities that cut across racial, economic, and health concerns exacerbate severe seasonal periods. Similarly, Robinson (2025) links the colonial violence seen in land dispossession and slavery as ‘[e]vidence of individual and collective vulnerability as a product of historical, colonial dynamics (2025: 172). All of these studies show that there is still much work to be done to address Wright and Tofa's call for recognition of ‘weather's sovereignty’ (2021) and the realisation that seasonal timeframes are an integral temporal spacing. Somewhere in between the immediacy of weather and the elongated (and increasingly uneven) climatic concerns, seasonality comes into view.

More-than-human seasonality

Seasonal practices are inherently more-than-human ways of knowing place (Bawaka Country et al., 2020). Seasonal knowledges cohere the astronomical and meteorological, mingling with vastly different temporalities and bodies that often exceed the human. Gamilaraay astronomer Karlie Noon, alongside Kamilaroi astrophysicist Krystal De Napoli, provide an example:

The nations of the Gariwerd region in Victoria have six main seasons, known as Kooyang (eel season), Gwangal Moronn (honey bee season), Chunnup (cockatoo season), Larneuk (nesting bird season), Petyan (wildflower season) and Ballambar (butterfly season). These seasons are also calendared by stellar variations and relay knowledge relating to climatic change, animal behaviour patterns, and plant life cycles. (2022: 86)

What human geographers might broadly term the ‘more-than-human’, understandings and practices of seasonality are based on relations of people, bodies, climates, cultures, and places. Across many subdisciplines of geography – particularly in cultural geographies of the everyday and atmospheres, in tourism and labour geographies, plant and animal geographies, and especially the geohumanities – more-than-human engagements with seasons come to light. However, these are often not positioned explicitly as seasonal geographies, or as distinctively seen and analysed through a seasonal lens.

Obvious forms of non-human seasonality are those which are easily perceptible to us as humans – cycles of animals, plants, weather, and more. Other forms of bodies and affects manifest in animate and inanimate actors that also move and are influenced in seasonal capacities. Livelihoods tied to traditional cultural practices and beliefs anchor communities to place through the ways that humans are bonded with-and-in local environments (Markkula et al., 2024b). In Bremner et al. (2022) and Cullen's (2021) work on monsoonal seasons, the monsoon becomes a temporal way to ‘think-with’ the monsoon as agentic in its reach – entangling livelihoods and elements within a particular climatic framing. The monsoon season opens other ways of being, labouring, and enduring elemental conditions, which in turn influence the material-social practices that have evolved around monsoonal periods. More-than-human relations often are spoken of in atmospheric terms, where particular agencies comingle and cumulate in what I suggestion can be considered within a more-than-human seasonal framing. For instance, much has been written about how dust, pollution, smog, haze, smoke, are agentic in their dispersal, as winds and jet streams mobilise in more-than-human scales, accelerated or buoyed by seasonal rhythms (Chang and Chien, 2023; Duffy et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2025; Zee, 2021). In their analysis of how the ‘haze season’ in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore is represented in media, Liu et al. (2025) describe that:

the construction of ‘haze season’ connects different groups of human and non-human entities that otherwise would not directly interact, but nonetheless are implicated in the haze assemblage and thereby influenced by each others’ cycles and rhythms (2025: 17)

Seasonal intensities exacerbate the ways that pollution envelops and shrouds, burns, chokes, and infects all kinds of bodies, yet becomes normalised as a very human condition that requires specific industrial governance and control (Povinelli, 2017). Increasing seasonal extremes on vulnerable species is also of concern in maintaining optimal atmospheric conditions for protected or threatened species of plants and animals (e.g. Rutherford and Marvin, 2025). Here, the well-rehearsed notion of ‘weathering’ from Ingold (2015) might be critiqued further in the ways that, as Engelmann and McCormack note, ‘become differently exposed’ (2021: 1429), especially when considered through a lens of more-than-human seasonality.

The atmospherics that certain seasons evoke in specific places and landscapes are of course more-than-human in their manifestation too. For instance, rapid mobilities that jet people across hemispheres have enjoyed relatively little attention in terms of seasonal differences, beyond the interrogation in tourism of high or low economic seasons; or in migration literature on seasonal labour and rural workforces (Barry, 2025; Barry, House and Ross, 2025). What might seem mundane to a local who dwells long-term in a season, creates delight and enjoyment for others traversing a seasonally specific landscape that they encounter in multisensory and more-than-human ways (Jensen and Gyimóthy, 2021; Larsen and Jensen, 2025). These ‘tourist gazes’ (Urry and Larsen, 2011) are drawcards in leisure and tourism geographies, yet they speak to a seasonal atmosphere of certain places that holidaymakers chase (Johannesson and Lund, 2017; Terkenli, 2005). Urry and Larsen remind us that ‘people gaze upon the world through a particular filter of ideas, skills, desires and expectations’ (2011: 2) and become entangled via embodied practices with and in the more-than-human relations around them. Changes that are subtler at the cusp of seasonal transitions – such as the first blush of autumn leaves, or the springtime buds ready to flower (Cumpston et al. 2022) – are perceived in place through aesthetic cues and biophysical relations.

Perceptible contrasts during different seasons also shape a more-than-human way of practicing and inhabiting place. Seasons are sometimes indulgent and enjoyable, or in other instances turbulent in their encounters as a body recalibrates to new environs. Ski and snow sports route tourists and pleasure seekers to wintery locations (Thorpe, 2017), or hunting the elusive northern (or southern) aurora lights produces ‘mystified and romanticised’ seasonal locations that reinvigorate our grasp of planetary systems (Johannesson and Lund, 2017; see also Edensor, 2016). There is potential, Bodden et al. write, ‘to develop alternative cultural practices of inhabiting seasonally darkened place’ (2024: 1605) that consider other relations that form across atmospheric qualities, landscape changes, and bodily relations that forge through these states. Geographies of light are in abundance (Edensor, 2012, 2016; Johannesson and Lund, 2017; see also Meijering et al., 2024 on experiences of daylight hours in aging), yet few have directly interrogated the seasonal qualities of light that reorient us through more-than-human encounters with place. Tim Edensor's writing on light and landscape attends to the hemispheric differences of light perception and quality, notably the contrast between the luminosity in the United Kingdom and northern Europe, and that of the harsh sunlight of Australian summers that casts deep shadows (2020). Here again, such observations of differing seasonal qualities show the stark differences between hemispheric contexts. Anyone who has jetsetted across hemispheres near a solstice knows the overbearing confrontation when disembarking the aircraft into searing hot / blisteringly cold opposing seasons. What starts to emerge from these all-too-human perceptions of seasonal differences are the ways that atmospherics and aesthetic cues from landscape draw us in and enfold in more-than-human ways through seasonal framings.

Environmental cues that are far beyond the human scale render elaborate movements across vast spaces and times. Migratory species have, until only recently in scholarship, remained elusive in their presence or absence from our all-too-human scientific renderings of seasonality. Take for example migratory birds, whom travel seasonally across trans-hemispheric flights to arrive and depart in their ‘summer’ or ‘winter’ homes (Barry, 2024; Barry and Suliman, 2023). Their ability to forecast low or high-pressure systems for optimal departure, navigate and guide by the Earth's magnetism, in order to journey non-stop over thousands of kilometres to return to a small stretch of coastline is still baffling to science, yet human cultures have witnessed this for thousands of years (Barry and Suliman, 2023). Many non-humans migrate seasonally, and on many different scales of relocation and activity too, responding to ecological shifts, weather, social and subsistence needs, in ways that are sometimes unworldly to human perception. In other instances, their mobilities are astonishing to humans, captivating audiences, and drawing pilgrimages and crowds. Geographers have written about the ‘falcon cams’ which live-broadcast the ‘breeding season’ of peregrine falcons from rooftops in cities around the world, combining not just the seasonal behaviours of avians, but the audiences of ‘seasoned’ bird watches who tune in (Searle et al., 2023). There are countless examples of seasonal breeding, hibernation, and mobility that are well accounted for in animal geographies and the geohumanities. My point here is that while there has been a significant amount of attention to the more-than-human seasonality, these seasonal rhythms are often written up as one small piece of the puzzle, and have yet to be interrogated in the specific temporal-spatial seasonality qualities in scholarship. Perhaps though, it is the seasonal ‘arrythmia’ (Dimick, 2025) of certain species that are the harbingers of anthropogenic ecological decline.

As with many sojourner species, such multispecies existences are impinged upon (or accelerated by) other forms of life via seasonal concerns. Newman's (2025) recent exploration of the seasonal spread of avian influenza adds another more-than-human element to the mix. Tracing the ‘breeding season’ of seabirds, Newman shows the devastating consequences of more-than-human encounters between avian, viral, and human livelihoods. High-density living and a reduction in terrain for wildlife mean that vector species – such as birds, bats, insects, and more – are often regarded only when seasonal intensities impinge on human activity or health. The wet markets at the forefront of the coronavirus pandemic (Gerlofs et al., 2024), or the recent relocation of bats and other species colonies away from farmlands into urban areas (Smith and McManus, 2024), has resulted in more-than-human tensions in how places can accommodate seasonal fluctuations of less-desirable species. Much has been written about the perils of relying on seasonal assumptions of flu and sickness as some kind of saving grace for global outbreaks (Rose-Redwood et al., 2020). However, industrial-scale farming, which arguably are the ideal site of viral flourishing, has engineered a widespread disregard of previously seasonal constraints of growing and cultivating under the guise of technological and economic rationales. Yet, Newman writes, these ‘violences of the viral cloud are felt different across the lifeworlds they engulf’ (2025: 1906). In yet another example of a fatal viral outbreak, the seasonal rhythms of such manoeuvres return us to the seasonal timeframes that industry tried to resist in the first place. Indeed, in many accounts of contemporary industrial farming – of animals and plants – the seasonal framings are redrawn around globalised circuits of production and consumption.

In the midst of possible devastations, farming practices and labour is an area in which more-than-human seasons frequently front-and-centre. In Phillips exploration of beekeeping, the ‘seasonal cycle of things’ becomes an ‘increased noticing of environmental shifts’ (2020: 321) in which other forms of care form in and beyond the human. Noticing the patterns of ‘swarming’, in which ‘some bees from one colony separate to form a new colony … most commonly as a sign of spring’ (2020: 321), conduits between animate and inanimate reciprocity come into focus. Another study of seasonal beekeeping by Bremer et al. (2024) highlighted the agility that responding seasonally required. Yet in other agricultural contexts, traditional customs and more-than-human knowledges are in jeopardy, such as reindeer herders in the Arctic (Markkula et al., 2024b). As seasonal rhythms fluctuate and shift in collective ways, the broader environmental changes and social and political responsiveness continue to distort seasonal industries such as farming and the very specific place-based practices (Barry, 2025). In other accounts, such as Gough, Langevang and Agblorti's (2026) exploration of fisherfolk in Ghana, they describe the impacts of a ‘closed’ fishing permit season had drastic economic consequences on human livelihoods, yet at the same time, anticipated a restorative season for aquatic life. Seasonal barriers rapidly can undermine human livelihood when attempting to elevate and protect others.

And while some instances of the more-than-human dramatically enter human registers of seasonality (such as avian influenza or the intensity of super-storms), as the examples above have shown, human activities that are responsive to the more-than-human have provided geographers with a wealth of research into reciprocity, care, and attentiveness to the seasons. At the same time, chiming with Bodden et al.'s calls to consider seasonal cycles ‘as well as their adjustment and alteration, or disturbance and glitching’ (2025: 603), there is certainly much more space for geographers to take a lead in using a seasonal framing to critique the ‘seasonal injustices’ (Dimick, 2025). And further, there is far more work to interrogate the capitalistic logics and powers that have perpetuated an exploitation of seasonality – and produced an aseasonality – in other life forms and existences.

Conclusion: Unseasonable or aseasonal futures

Recent years have shown the violence and devastation that unseasonable events bring; from elongated flu seasons to catastrophic natural disasters, many of these occurring out-of-season (Barry, 2025; Bremer and Wardekker, 2024). However, expectations of what kinds of conditions are in a ‘typical’ season – or as I have argued elsewhere, what we might think of as ‘unseasonable’ (Barry, 2025) – relies on assumptions of cyclical and ingrained rhythms of social practices. But seasons ‘are never identical’ (Gough et al., 2026: 3). Examples that stretch across human geography and many other related disciplines show rich scholarship that is cognizant of the relations that seasonality draws together, in often spontaneous or unexpected encounters. However, there are tendencies to assume certain seasonal qualities, especially in work on climate and weather. Or the seasons are deployed as an overarching or enveloping meteorological state with iterant manifestations. To trouble some of these assumptions, it is helpful to consider how future geographies surface other forms of agencies and animacies, as well as absences and presences of seasonality. How do we reconcile the erratic planetary systems that continue to distort and disrupt seasonal temporalities, while relishing in long-standing traditions and knowledges that have been underpinned by seasonal practices? And how might future scholarship on seasonality resist colonial (and I would add industrial, technological) restraints, and grapple with a kind of aseasonal capitalist global order? In this concluding section, I offer these two provocations for how future geographies of the seasons may take place.

First, the notion of the aseasonal could be an avenue for critique on ways to resist or trouble the colonial and capitalist demands. While seasonality has been considered in the contexts of labour migration and production, there is scope to delve further into year-round production and consumption which have become accepted in global lifestyles. My opening reflections on the ‘in season’ berries that are actually for sale year-round, renders a distorted perception of seasonality in food and production contexts. Such absurd notions of ‘seasons’ of farming mean very little when the farm gate is hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres away from the consumer (Barry, House and Ross, 2025). ‘Tamed’ and weathered landscapes (Wright, 2024), cultivated and inevitably profited from such extractive, destructive industries have rendered seasonal timeframes to a mere background. Such a way of thinking about the temporality of seasons might be closer towards an aseasonal understanding, driven by capitalist demands and settler-colonial legacies.

Monocropping has become synonymous with profit – and importantly labour – in which seasonal highs and lows that previously inhibited farming, are now significantly dulled. For the livelihoods of farming communities, or for the elongated or protracted lives of crops, livestock, and other commodities, there is a perverse form of more-than-human seasonality at play. And for many ‘seasonal’ migrant workers, their perspectives on moving with seasonal opportunities also are highly unaccounted for in scholarship. Industrial scales of farming, distribution, cultivation, or logistics, are all underpinned by labour forces that are transient and often in highly precarious migration status. Seafarers who drive global shipping and logistics, sail across endless seas and seasons, as they voyage through months of monotonous weather chasing ocean currents (Borovnik, 2024). Farm workers are relocated across large regions and sometimes nations, as they follow the harvest trails for optimal harvest (Barry, 2025). Industries reliant on mining, brickmaking, or rare minerals, also require labour that is responsive to seasonal conditions from the monsoonal or when in drought (Cullen, 2021). There are countless more examples. Seasonal mobility has become the underpinning default in a significant amount of human migration, and of course, this influences the movements of goods and commodities in more-than-human supply chains across the globe. Learnings from labour and productivity might be considered through an aseasonal lens, while also prioritised in scholarship via the voices of these often precarious, underpaid, and exploited seasonal workforces and the many non-human lives that they care for and work with.

Finally, I suggest that there is an urgent need to reconsider the weather and climatic assumptions of seasonality in light of global heating. Communities are scrambling to adapt to ‘unseasonable’ temporalities (Barry, 2025; Dimick, 2025), where weather extremes are taking place on vastly different scales, durations, and frequencies. Across continents, people and governments are now primed to anticipate a year-round ‘fire season’ (Vaillant, 2023), or are poised to evacuate or relocate after floods, typhoons, and a myriad of other climatic disasters (Sodero, 2022). Anticipatory temporalities are thrown into the mix, where reckoning with the climate catastrophe has begun to noticeably accelerate, even for groups who may have previously denied such forecasts (Barry, 2025). At the same time, anthropogenic climate change has accelerated a flourishing of viral encounters, where elongated ‘flu seasons’ have become rationalised as some kind of ‘new normal’ we have adapted to (Bissell, 2021: 157). Exceptional seasonal conditions now produce bouts of ‘thunderstorm asthma’, rendering thousands of people in immediate, life-threatening situations (Jensen and Barry, 2023). The rapid flare-up of extreme allergens and pollutants swept in with unseasonable winds cause havoc for susceptible bodies (Calvillo, 2023; Chang and Chien, 2023). These new temporalities of seasonal intensities rely on quite large more-than-human scales that oscillate between anticipatory waiting or emergency in shorter timespans than previously experienced.

Other unseasonal distresses play out in more elongated temporalities. Farmers desperately wait for rain during a ‘wet season’ that may never materialise. Such experiences were widely documented in Australia's infamous ‘millennium drought’ where the colloquial ‘dry season’ stretched out for a decade and a half (Alexandra and Richards, 2021). Entire regions across the world hover anxiously between such distorted seasons – from ‘day zero’ when water reserves will run dry for major cities of millions, or, on the other end, an excessive monsoonal-type drenching in temperate regions. Temporal markers and hemispheric divisions that previously made clean delineations between places and seasonal practices have been seemingly evaporated in the last half-decade. It feels like scholars are no longer grappling with climate change, but the ‘ways it might change’ (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011: 286), which we are seeing play out in so many various scenarios that seemed futuristic (and futile) to entertain just a decade or so ago. Rather than manifesting in a standardised schedule, ‘a number of ambient states are elucidated throughout the seasons’ (Adams-Hutcheson, 2019: 1006), some of which are difficult to grasp and accept.

Seasonal relations are being radically changed, as Bremer and Wardekker note, ‘through shifts in resources, in governments, worldviews, technologies and skills, economic trade, and so on’ (2024: 1). Liu et al. go further in suggesting renaming or coining the ‘recurrent anthropogenic environmental events as “seasons” signifies societal reaction to environmental change phenomena’ (2026: 3). But as others have noted, we must be cautious with universalising temporalities that tend to flatten and dismiss the violences of imperial, industrial, and colonial powers. Simply labelling unseasonable weather due to human intervention is not enough, because a universalised framing of climate blame ‘doesn’t significantly differentiate between countries, ideologies, or ways of life’ (Davis and Todd, 2017: 776). Yet the political and industrial ambivalence, compounded by a failure to reconcile with colonial pasts, hints at a societal amnesia to these rapid shifts, continue to distort and fracture seasonal rhythms as planetary systems are pushed further into extremes.

Seasonality might be witnessed through practice, through labour, leisure, processual or rhythmic endeavours, or it may be something that hovers on the edges of perception, a slow-moving change that ebbs and flows as time passes. My point here is that the notion of ‘seasonality’ emerges as a slippery term, which hovers somewhere between a universalising notion of climate and the more immediate perception of weather. As climate change takes grasp and alters meteorological conditions, ‘our sensibility towards seasons is necessarily on the move’ (Barry, 2025: 11). Increasingly unseasonable weather further distorts these boundaries. How are individuals, communities, and indeed societies at large able to take actions to reorient to these erratic seasonal fluxes, let alone cope and adapt to seasonal change (Gough et al., 2026: 2)? Understanding seasonality more broadly can assist in attuning to these elongated, temporal considerations of seasonal rhythms and relations that underpin social, cultural, ecological, and political life.