Researching children’s silences: Exploring the fullness of voice in childhood research

Abstract

This article attempts to problematize the notion of children’s voices by focusing on one of its more problematic features, namely, silence. It argues that far from being absences or lack of data, children’s silences are pregnant with meaning and a constitutive feature of their voices; childhood researchers who need to account for children’s voices must therefore attend to their silences rather than merely their voiced utterances. Drawing on poststructuralist critiques of voice, this article illustrates the value of taking children’s silences seriously by situating them within the proper interactional, institutional, and discursive contexts which give rise to them.