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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

A Focus on Voice and Sharing Knowledge

Our journey towards becoming a Rights Respecting School began with a passion for ensuring children’s voices are heard. Since May 2024, Treehouse Nursery has been a Silver-accredited Rights Respecting setting, committed to giving children in the early years a strong foundation before they move to primary school - empowering them to become global citizens.

We believe that involving children as young as two in decision-making fosters ownership and agency. To achieve this, we implemented strategies such as a steering group that includes children, parents, and staff. Babies as young as four months learn about their rights through our ‘My Rights Are HEARD’ values, while weekly rights briefings and stay-and-play sessions engage families in conversations about the UNCRC. Monthly newsletters and CPD resources keep staff and parents informed, and age-appropriate news connects children to global issues.

Our Children’s Voices curriculum reinforces that children are rights holders and adults are duty bearers. We have shifted language and practice - replacing rules with charters, holding regular discussions about safety and responsibilities, and using core books that teach children to speak up to duty bearers. Inclusivity is central: family trees throughout the nursery celebrate diverse family structures, and authors share stories that affirm respect for all families. (Young children’s voices are heard at Treehouse Nursery – Rights Respecting Schools Award)

The above is a summarised version of a ‘good practice case-study’ as part of a Resources for Rights Respecting Schools within the UNICEF UK’s Rights Respecting Schools Award (RRSA). The Treehouse Nursery example demonstrates a commitment to student voice from a very early age, positioning even babies and toddlers as active participants and knowledge sharers through initiatives such as the My Rights Are HEARD values, weekly rights briefings, and steering groups involving children, parents, and staff. This approach reflects the ethos of UNICEF UK’s Rights Respecting Schools Award, a nationwide initiative that embeds the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into educational practice. Through RRSA, over 1.7 million children in the UK engage with these ideals: they learn about their rights, experience environments where their voices matter, and develop in settings that value participation. The RRSA framework is built on three strands – teaching about rights, teaching through rights, and teaching for rights (see Quennerstedt, 2022) – ensuring that children not only learn their rights but experience them in everyday interactions.

Article 12 of the UNCRC is widely regarded as the cornerstone of children’s participation rights. It guarantees that children capable of forming their own views have the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting them, and that these views should be given due weight according to age and maturity (UNCRC, 1989). This article is the most frequently cited in educational contexts (McCafferty, 2017; Robinson, 2021) and underpins initiatives such as RRSA. To operationalise Article 12, UNICEF UK draws on Lundy’s (2007) model, which provides a framework for children’s participation rights through four interrelated elements: creating space for their views, enabling them to express their voice, ensuring an audience listens, and guaranteeing their influence on decisions – thus ensuring that children not only have opportunities to express their views but that these views are listened to and acted upon (UNICEF UK, n.d.). Together with Article 13, which guarantees freedom of expression, Article 12 positions voice and knowledge-sharing as fundamental rights rather than privileges, shaping policies and practices across schools and early years settings.

Building on rights-based frameworks such as RRSA, educational research, particularly with young children, has increasingly focused on operationalising listening through a variety of innovative methods. Over the past two decades, there has been a significant proliferation of approaches designed to ‘capture’ children’s voices, particularly in early years settings. While adult-led interviews are still common, they are now complemented by visual, participatory, and child-led practices, including photo-voice, mapping, and arts-based techniques (Urbina-Garcia et al., 2022). Creative methodologies inspired by the Mosaic approach have introduced multimodal strategies such as tours, drawings, and mark-making (Clark, 2017), while participatory ethics frameworks emphasise playful and developmentally appropriate engagement (Burke and Mercieca, 2024). From our own research, we explored several of these methods in depth, including observations in play-based settings, puppet-mediated conversations, and creative techniques such as drawings, floorbooks, and mapping, alongside innovative strategies like InPhoTours – child-led photo tours combined with voice recordings (Burke and Mercieca, 2024; Burke, et al., 2026). These approaches, influenced by the Reggio Emilia’s concept of children as having 100 languages (Malaguzzi, 1996), aimed to provide multiple entry points for children to share their perspectives, reflecting the broader trend toward methodological diversity in listening research and aligning with Lundy’s (2007) model of space, voice, audience, and influence.

The Treehouse Nursery ‘good practice case-study’ from the RRSA and proliferation of research methods aimed at ‘capturing’ children’s voices introduces our argument. Conceptualisations of children’s ‘voice’ and ‘listening’ sometimes seem naïve and have led to tokenistic approaches to capturing children’s voices. Lundy’s (2007) seminal paper challenges the notion that simply giving children a voice is sufficient, arguing instead for a more holistic framework that ensures their views are both heard and acted upon. Similarly, Jackson and Mazzei’s (2009) edited volume and subsequent work have been influential in disrupting conventional, interpretive, and critical paradigms in qualitative research, opening space for more complex engagements with voice and meaning-making. In the field of philosophy with children, Haynes and Carvalho (2023) have contributed important insights into dialogic practices that foreground children’s participation as co-thinkers and co-inquirers.

These critiques are powerful in their challenge of the concept of voice and practices of listening. Nancy’s (2007) question takes this challenge further: ‘What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all his being?’ (p. 4). Is the focus on ‘being’ a forgotten dimension in listening to children’s voices? Maybe we need to start by asking whose being are we talking about: that of children, adults or both? Or is there a possibility of both ‘being-with’ (Nancy, 2000)? We find that this added dimension to the idea of listening enables us to articulate our dissatisfaction with tokenistic methods of capturing children’s voice. We were intrigued by the idea of listening as ‘being-with’ and wanted to engage with this further.

In this paper, we draw on Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy to interrogate the concepts of voice and listening. To engage meaningfully with listening, we first need to question the notion of voice. Derrida’s deconstructive critique of presence and voice as a privileged site of meaning unsettles the assumption that voice transparently conveys truth or intention. His work acts as an important intermediary, opening space for questioning the metaphysics of presence that often underpins discourses of ‘listening to children’s voices’. Building on this, Nancy radicalises the critique by shifting attention from voice as expression to listening as resonance and relationality. Nancy does not simply extend Derrida’s critique; he pushes it further by emphasising the co-constitutive nature of listening – where meaning emerges not from a singular voice but from the interplay of bodies, sounds, and spaces. This move allows us to rethink, in our UK context, what it means to ‘listen’ to children, a listening beyond representational or tokenistic frameworks.

Phonocentrism

The call to ‘listen to children’s voices’ has become a central ethical and methodological imperative in education and childhood studies. It signals a commitment to participation, recognition, and respect for children as agents in research and practice. Yet, this seemingly progressive injunction carries an unexamined assumption: that voice, particularly spoken voice, offers direct, authentic access to meaning. This assumption aligns with what Derrida (1976) famously critiques as phonocentrism, the privileging of speech over writing and other forms of signification. Phonocentrism is not a minor linguistic preference; it is a structural feature of Western metaphysics, grounded in the belief that speech guarantees presence, truth, and self-identity. Derrida (1976) writes that ‘the voice is heard (understood). . . as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection’ (p. 20). This formulation captures the illusion that hearing oneself speak collapses the gap between signifier and signified, securing a self-present subjectivity. Writing, by contrast, is cast as derivative, external, and dangerous – a mere supplement to the living voice. This hierarchy underpins epistemological and ethical frameworks that shape research practices, as well as everyday school practices, including those that claim to ‘give voice’ to children.

When educational discourse strongly encourages us to ‘listen to children’s voices’, it often presumes that voice equals speech. This presumption carries two risks. First, it excludes non-verbal modalities. Children communicate in diverse ways – through gestures, play, silence, drawing, and interactions with materials, reflecting the concept of ‘a hundred languages’. A phonocentric orientation privileges spoken language, rendering these modes secondary or invisible. For children with disabilities, multilingual backgrounds, or preverbal capacities, such privileging is not only epistemologically flawed but ethically problematic. Second, (this is the main risk) it romanticises authenticity. The notion that voice offers unmediated access to the child’s inner world echoes the metaphysics of presence. It neglects Derrida’s insight that meaning is always deferred – what he calls différance – mediated by context and constituted through traces. Listening, therefore, cannot be reduced to decoding speech; it must grapple with the instability and plurality of signification.

Phonocentrism, for Derrida, is inseparable from logocentrism, the Western tradition’s privileging of logos (reason, speech, and meaning) as the foundation of truth. In Of Grammatology, Derrida (1976) argues that Western thought has consistently treated speech as the guarantor of presence because the voice seems to offer immediate access to consciousness. When I hear myself speak, I appear to coincide with myself; the signifier seems to vanish, leaving pure meaning. This is what Derrida calls auto-affection – the illusion that the subject is fully present to itself in the act of speaking. Writing, by contrast, introduces distance, delay, and exteriority. It is a supplement, a term Derrida uses ironically to show that what is considered secondary is in fact constitutive. Writing reveals that meaning is never pure or immediate; it is always mediated by signs, by spacing, by difference. This critique unsettles the ethical injunction to ‘listen to children’s voices’. If voice is not a transparent conduit of truth but a site of mediation and différance, then listening cannot aim to recover an origin. It must instead acknowledge that meaning is produced through traces, through relational and material entanglements (Barad, 2007). To privilege speech as authenticity is to reinscribe the metaphysics of presence – the very gesture Derrida deconstructs.

For this paper, it is of interest to dwell for a moment on Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism through the engagement with Chinese ideography (see Cheng, 1995), especially because, as already mentioned above, young children’s voice cannot only be accessed through spoken voice but also through other means. In Of Grammatology, Derrida (1976) draws on Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s fascination with Chinese characters to challenge the phonological prejudice of Western thought. For Derrida, ideographic writing exemplifies two qualities that disrupt phonocentrism: irreducibility and undecidability. Irreducibility refers to the materiality of the sign. Unlike alphabetic writing, which is subordinated to phonetic representation, Chinese characters cannot be reduced to sound. Their graphic form sustains meaning in ways that resist phonetic translation. As Derrida notes, ‘This irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition’ (Cheng, 1995: 134). Undecidability signals the openness of meaning. Chinese characters, composed of juxtaposed elements, invite multiple interpretations. They do not fix meaning but generate a play of relations – a principle that Derrida finds echoed in Mallarmé’s poetry. Why does this matter for listening to children? Because children’s communicative practices – gestures, drawings, silences – are similarly irreducible and undecidable. They cannot be collapsed into speech without loss. Like ideograms, these expressions resist phonetic capture; they demand an ethics of listening that honours their materiality and plurality. To treat a drawing as a transparent window into the child’s mind is to repeat the phonocentric gesture under a visual guise. Derrida’s insight invites us to listen otherwise: not for presence, but for the play of traces.

This insight becomes even more compelling when we consider the critique of phonocentrism through the lens of Deaf Studies. Derrida (1976) calls phonocentrism ‘the most original and powerful ethnocentrism’ (p. 3), and Deaf history dramatises this claim. As Bauman (2008) argues, the privileging of speech has not only shaped metaphysics but produced institutional violence: oralist education, suppression of sign languages, and the pathologisation of deaf bodies. For centuries, signed languages were dismissed as rudimentary gestures, incapable of abstract thought, a prejudice rooted in Saussure’s insistence on the ‘natural bond’ between sound and meaning. This bias led to practices that forbade signing in schools, enforced lip-reading, and even subjected deaf children to physical punishment for using their hands (Bauman, 2008). Such histories expose the ethical stakes of phonocentrism: it is not merely a theoretical orientation but a regime that normalises certain bodies and silences others. Today there is an awareness in practice and research that attends to visual and spatial forms of expression, what Bauman calls ‘the invisible trace of gesture’, opens possibilities for a more inclusive ethics of listening, thus reducing the risk of an audist logic.

Sign languages dismantle the assumption that language equals speech. They are not mere supplements but full linguistic systems with complex syntax and morphology. They exploit iconicity and spatial grammar, challenging the principles of arbitrariness and linearity that Saussure – and by extension, phonocentrism – treat as universal. As Oliver Sacks observes, ‘Much of what occurs linearly, sequentially, temporally in speech becomes simultaneous, concurrent, multileveled in Sign’ (as cited in Bauman, 2008: 88). This spatiality resonates with the Reggio Emilia notion of the ‘hundred languages of children’. If language is not bound to sound, then listening must expand beyond the ear. Children’s languages’ gesture, drawing, movement – echo the visual poetics of sign language. They demand an ethics of listening attuned to simultaneity, tactility, and visuality. Yet, as Derrida reminds us, even these languages do not offer pure presence. Signing, like writing, resists full auto-affection; one cannot fully ‘see oneself sign’, leaving traces of non-presence. This reinforces Derrida’s notion of supplementarity: meaning emerges through displacement and spacing, not immediacy.

The violence of phonocentrism, as Bauman (2008) shows, lies in its dream of self-presence – a logos that ‘believes itself to be its own father’ (p. 39). Speech declares itself alive by expelling its other: writing, sign, gesture. This expulsion is not merely conceptual but material, enacted through educational policies, medical interventions, and technologies aimed at normalising hearing. In this light, the ethical imperative to ‘listen to children’s voices’ must be interrogated. If listening is confined to speech, it risks becoming a technology of normalisation, erasing the plurality of children’s expressive resources. To listen ethically is to resist this metaphysics of voice-as-presence. It means embracing the multiplicity of expression, spoken, signed, drawn, enacted, without collapsing them into a single transparent mode. This is not a celebration of diversity for its own sake, but a deconstructive stance that unsettles the desire for immediacy.

Dolar (2005, 2006) deepens this critique by revealing the ambivalence of voice. While Derrida exposes its metaphysical privilege, Dolar shows that voice oscillates between presence and excess, cure and poison. In Plato and Augustine, music is praised for elevating the soul yet feared for its sensuality – a pharmakon that both redeems and corrupts. This ambivalence unsettles the fantasy of voice as pure transparency. For listening to children, the implication is clear: voice is not a neutral conduit of truth but a site of affect, desire, and power. Even visual voice – gestures, expressions – carries this ambiguity. It is never pure; it is always mediated. To listen ethically is to embrace this opacity, to resist the lure of immediacy.

The conversation between Cixous and Derrida (2019) on deconstruction and childhood illuminates these issues. Derrida describes deconstruction as ‘childlike’ in two senses: as a return to the moment before language – the infans who ‘does not speak yet’ – and as a polymorphous engagement with language that refuses renunciation. Deconstruction, Derrida insists, is not a problematic but an exposure to what cannot even be problematised – a risk without assurance. This exposure resonates with the child’s openness to play, invention, and the ‘everything-possible’ state that Cixous evokes. For Derrida (1976), the critique of logocentrism is inseparable from this attention to the pre-verbal: the cry, the hiccup, the syllable that ‘does not yet form a language. To listen to children, then, is to attend to this limit – to the murmurs and silences that resist capture by phonocentric norms. It is to recognise that what matters is not the fullness of presence but the trembling of meaning.

Cooper (2022) critiques voice research for treating voice as an authentic expression of a stable subject. Voices are extracted, transcribed, and represented in ways that disconnect them from embodied and affective contexts. The assumption that ‘giving voice’ recovers an inner truth is deeply problematic. Poststructuralist and materialist perspectives challenge this assumption, unveiling voices as fluid, relational, and entangled within assemblages of bodies, objects, and discourses. Cooper calls for methodologies that move beyond talk to embrace multimodal, embodied, and material dimensions – photographs, drawings, map-making, collaborative visual practices. Yet even these expansions risk reabsorbing difference into a representational logic that seeks transparency.

The imperative to ‘listen to children’s voices’ therefore must be rethought in light of Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and its ethical implications. Voice is neither pure nor self-present; it is marked by difference, trace, and ambiguity. To privilege speech as authenticity is to reinscribe the metaphysics of presence and risk silencing other modes of expression. To treat visual voice as transparent repeats the same gesture under a different guise. We can envision an ethics of listening that is multimodal, non-phonocentric, and attuned to the resonant plurality of children’s communicative practices. Such an approach does not abandon voice but situates it within a broader ecology of expression – an ecology where listening becomes not the capture of meaning but the opening to its impossibility, its différance, and its promise. The challenge, then, is not simply to diversify methods but to rethink listening as a deconstructive practice: a practice that suspends the desire for immediacy and opens to the play of traces.

Resonance

The critique of phonocentrism and the instability of voice, as explored through Derrida, opens a conceptual space for rethinking listening beyond representation. If meaning is never fully present, then listening cannot be reduced to a methodological act of capture. It becomes an ethical and ontological question: what does it mean to listen when presence is impossible? Jean-Luc Nancy radicalises this question by shifting the focus from language to being. His work invites us to consider listening not as a technique but as a mode of existence – a way of being-with (Nancy, 2000) others in a shared world.

Nancy begins by challenging phenomenology’s privileging of sight and presence. As Roney (2013) explains, phenomenology sought to disclose the structures of experience through visual metaphors of clarity and illumination. Nancy resists this ocularcentrism, proposing that listening is not about bringing something to light but about resonating with what withdraws from full presence. Listening, for Nancy (2007), is ‘being on the edge of meaning’ (p. 7): a movement toward meaning that remains incomplete, a straining toward what cannot be fully grasped. Nancy (2007) writes that to listen is ‘tendre l’oreille – literally, to stretch the ear – an expression that evokes a singular mobility. . . it is an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety’ (p. 5). This gesture of openness contrasts sharply with the instrumental logic that underpins many participatory frameworks, where listening is imagined as a pathway to authentic voice.

To listen, in Nancy’s sense, is to expose oneself. To listen, for Nancy, is ‘to be straining toward or in an approach to the self. . . neither to a proper self (I), nor to the self of an other, but. . . to the form, structure, and movement of an infinite referral. . . when one is listening , one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself’ (Nancy, 2007: 9). It is not the confident act of hearing, of believing one has understood, but a disposition of vulnerability. Listening is described as ‘passing over to the register of presence to self’, (Nancy, 2007) where the self is nothing substantial but the resonance of a return. This resonance is not metaphorical; it is material and affective. Louria-Hayon (2023) emphasises Nancy’s notion of the corps sonore, the sonorous body that vibrates with sound. Listening involves touch as much as hearing; it is haptic, embodied, and plural. Sound does not simply signify; it evokes, calling us into relation. In this sense, listening is not a decoding of signs but an attunement to rhythms, tones, and intervals that exceed semantic capture.

Yet resonance alone does not exhaust Nancy’s concept of sense. As Devisch (2006) argues, Nancy’s thinking of sense is inseparable from his thinking of world and community. Sense is not a property added to existence; it is the very structure of existence. ‘If there is world, there is sense. The there is makes sense in itself and as such’ (Nancy, 1993: 18, cited in Devisch, 2006: 3). The world does not have sense; it is sense. This claim dismantles metaphysical frameworks that locate meaning outside the world – in God, in transcendence, or in a subject. Once these frameworks collapse, sense is no longer a given order but the contingency of being-in-the-world. We are exposed to the world and to ourselves, and this exposure is the sense of existence. Sense, then, is not a hidden essence waiting to be uncovered; it is the spacing of relations, the way existence co-appears (Devisch, 2006; Nancy, 2000).

This exposure is what Nancy (1997a) calls the ‘shock of sense’ (p. 67). To think sense is to be passible for this shock – to welcome what presents itself without mastery. Passibility is not mere passivity; it is an active openness, a readiness to be affected. Listening, in this light, becomes a praxis of sense: an exercise in being passible for the world as sense. It is to dwell on the limit, ‘on this edge without an outside, which is nothing but the minuscule opening of sense’ (Nancy, 1997a: 67). This opening is not transcendence but what Nancy names transimmanence: the way sense exceeds itself from within, creating an interval that makes existence possible (Devisch, 2006; Nancy, 1997b: 91).

Nancy’s ontology of sense is inseparable from his concept of community. Being is always being-with; existence is co-existence. Sense is not common to us as a substance we possess; we are in-common, and that is the sense (Devisch, 2006; Nancy, 2000). Community is not a fusion into a single identity but the sharing of voices, the plurality of singular expressions. ‘We don’t own sense. It is given to us, in a multiple and each time singular way’ (Devisch, 2006: 7). This plurality resists totalitarian closures that seek an absolute sense. It thrives in the polyphony of interpretations, in the differential spacing of the in – the ‘in-between’ that makes being-in-common possible. Listening, then, is not only an aesthetic or epistemic act; it is an ethical stance toward plurality. It acknowledges that sense is always divided, always shared, always in motion.

Nancy’s (2007) Listening distinguishes listening from hearing. Hearing belongs to the order of comprehension; listening belongs to the order of resonance. ‘To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning’ (Nancy, 2007: 7). Listening is not a metaphor for access to self but the reality of this access: ‘it listens to itself, by listening to itself finds itself, and by finding itself deviates from itself in order to resound further away’ (Nancy, 2007: 35). The self, in this account, is not a stable substance but a sonorous fold – a resonance that bends and rebounds. This curvature of listening, as Gritten (2010) notes, precedes subjectivity: the subject is constituted as listening, as resonance before it becomes intentionality. ‘I am listening’, Nancy writes, not as a description of an activity but as an ontological statement: listening is what we are.

These ontological insights illuminate Nancy’s reconfiguration of listening. Listening is not a technique for extracting meaning but a mode of being passible for sense – a way of inhabiting the interval where sense happens. It is an attunement to the resonance of existence, to the plurality of voices that constitute our being-in-common. This attunement contrasts with hearing, which seeks closure and certainty. Hearing belongs to the logic of manifestation: it aims to bring presence to light, to stabilise meaning. Listening belongs to the logic of evocation: it summons presence without fixing it, sustains openness without resolving it (Nancy, 2007: 20).

The aesthetic dimension of this logic is evident in Nancy’s reflections on music. Music does not communicate a determinate message; it calls, breathes, inspires. Its truth lies not in what it says but in its capacity to resound. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty (2024) illustrate this through pedagogical vignettes. When a piano teacher urges a student to ‘open the pores of the piano’ or to play with ‘direction’, she is not transmitting propositional knowledge but evoking a sonic ideal – an image of sound that must be felt rather than conceptualised. Similarly, Duarte Bono (2025) reads Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a narrative of evocation: the protagonist’s descent into Armstrong’s music suspends chronological time, inaugurating a kairological moment of possibility. In both cases, listening unfolds as an event – a happening that cannot be reduced to instruction or interpretation.

This emphasis on resonance has profound implications for thinking about children’s voices. If listening is not about capturing a pre-existing meaning but about attuning to the pulse of sense, then the multiplicity of children’s expressive forms – speech, gesture, drawing, movement – must be understood as resonant events rather than transparent signs. These forms do not simply represent inner states; they create worlds. They are not reducible to semantic content; they vibrate with rhythms, intervals, and timbres that summon sense without fixing it. To listen to a child’s silence, for example, is not to decode a hidden message but to dwell in the interval where sense trembles – where meaning is possible because it is not yet given.

Nancy’s notion of timbre, elaborated by Gritten (2010), sharpens this point. Timbre is ‘sound without language, sonorous matter without form’ (Nancy, 2007: 13). It is the inside-out of sound, a Moebius strip that folds presence and absence into one continuous surface. Listening to timbre is to be ‘at the same time outside and inside [sound], to be open from without and from within’ (Nancy, 2007: 14). This logic of evocation, summoning rather than manifesting, applies to children’s voices in their plurality. A child’s drawing, like timbre, is not a phenomenon to be decoded but an event that calls for resonance. It demands patience, sensitivity, and a willingness to let sense circulate without forcing it into predetermined categories.

Resonance also introduces a temporal dimension that unsettles linear models of interpretation. As Alfano (2012) observes, Nancy’s account of listening aligns with Derrida’s notion of spectrality: the present is hollowed out by repetition, by the ‘re-’ that marks every return. Listening unfolds in waves, cycles, and rhythms; it is a ‘present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line’ (Nancy, 2007: 13). This temporality resonates with the experience of listening to children, where meaning emerges through iterative gestures, deferred responses, and echoes that cannot be synchronised. A child’s voice, like a ghost in Derrida’s reading of Hamlet, is never simply present; it arrives and returns, each time as both first and last, each time as other. To listen is to inhabit this spectral temporality – to welcome what comes without mastery, to remain open to what remains to come.

For educational research, these insights are transformative. If listening is exposure rather than mastery, then the researcher cannot position themself as the sovereign interpreter of children’s voices. Instead, they enter a relation of co-appearance, a being-with that Nancy calls être-avec. Listening to children is not about accessing a pre-existing world of meaning inside the child; it is about creating a shared world in which sense can circulate. When children engage in play, drawing, or storytelling, they are not simply expressing inner truths; they are world-making. The researcher, by listening, enters this creative process, not as a master but as a co-participant.

This co-participation requires attunement rather than extraction. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty (2024) introduce Nancy’s distinction between ‘perceptible individuation’ (the singular sound or gesture encountered) and ‘intelligible identity’ (the horizon of sense that orients interpretation). In practice, this means that when a child offers a fragment – a word, a silence, a movement – the researcher does not rush to fix its meaning. They let it resonate, relate it to other fragments, and allow new patterns to emerge. This is not relativism; it is fidelity to the event of sense, which is always plural and in motion. Such listening transforms research. It shifts from data collection to co-creation, from representation to relation. It acknowledges that meaning is not given but made – in the interval between voices, in the rhythm of interaction.

The ethical stakes of this shift are significant. If listening is exposure, then it demands vulnerability. The researcher must relinquish control, accept uncertainty, and resist premature closure. This does not mean abandoning rigor; it means redefining rigor as responsiveness rather than replication. It means cultivating what Nancy calls a ‘praxis of sense’ (Roney, 2013: 345): an activity that does not aim at mastery but at sustaining the openness of meaning. In the context of listening to children, this entails creating spaces where voices – verbal, visual, gestural – can resonate without being reduced to data points. It entails recognising that silence, hesitation, and ambiguity are not deficits but dimensions of sense.

From voice to expression

Returning to Article 12 of the UNCRC, which foregrounds the child’s right to express views, we note that this emphasis on expression aligns more closely with what Derrida and Nancy argue. Expression suggests movement, openness, and relationality – qualities that resist the metaphysics of presence and the illusion of fixed meaning. It gestures toward an ongoing process rather than a completed act, toward sense that emerges in intervals, rhythms, and resonances rather than in stable signs. By contrast, the discourse of ‘voice’ often implies a self-contained, authentic truth that can be captured and recorded – precisely the assumption that Derrida and Nancy challenge. Derrida reminds us that listening is not a decoding of signs but an attunement to rhythms, tones, and intervals that exceed semantic capture. Nancy pushes this further, framing listening as an activity that does not aim at mastery but sustains the openness of meaning.

Nancy’s ontology of sense invites us to rethink the impossible possibility of listening to children’s voices: impossible, because presence is never full; possible, because sense arises in the very spacing of this impossibility. Listening, then, is not a methodological guarantee but an ontological and ethical stance – a way of being-with that transforms research into world-making. It is a praxis that resists closure, sustains openness, and honours the resonant plurality of childhood. In embracing this stance, we move from extracting voices to cultivating relations – from data to dialogue, from representation to resonance.

For research with young children, this entails creating spaces where voices – verbal, visual, gestural – can resonate without being reduced to data points. It requires recognising that silence, hesitation, and ambiguity are not deficits but dimensions of sense. Listening becomes an ethical praxis of openness, attunement, and co-creation. Children’s voices are not objects to capture but events of sense-making that transform the research assemblage. To listen is to enter these events without mastery, to sustain the interval where meaning circulates without closure.

This reconfiguration has methodological and ethical implications. It calls for approaches that privilege relation over representation, responsiveness over replication. It invites researchers to create conditions where resonance can occur – where ambiguity and plurality are not problems to solve but possibilities to sustain. In this light, listening to children is not about giving voice but about sharing in the resonance of being – a practice that honours plurality, sustains openness, and transforms research into world-making.