The impossible possibility of listening to (young) children’s voices

This paper questions the dominant discourse of listening to (young) children’s voices by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of resonance to propose a more attuned conceptualisation of listening. While Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child foregrounds the child’s right to ‘express views’, this principle has often been translated into a language of ‘voice, which risks reducing expression to a representational act – something to be extracted and recorded. Expression, by contrast, suggests movement, openness, and relationality, qualities that resonate with Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida questions the assumption that voice transparently conveys meaning, exposing how it is always marked by différance and trace rather than full presence. Nancy radicalises this critique by positioning listening as an activity that does not aim at mastery but sustains the openness of meaning – a mode of being-with that allows for plurality and indeterminacy. For research and practice with young children, this shift demands creating spaces where voices (verbal, visual, gestural) can resound without being reduced to data points, and where sense can emerge in its plurality rather than being fixed or closed.