Getting to the Art of the Matter: Exploring Autonomy and Relationality in Babies' Right to Be Heard Through the Participatory Arts

ABSTRACT This paper explores relational understandings of children's participation rights, particularly for babies and very young children under 2 years old. We draw on selected data from the Voice of the Baby research project commissioned by Starcatchers, an early years arts organisation in Scotland (2022‐ongoing). The overarching aim of the Voice of the Baby project is to explore how babies' participation rights might be realised through the participatory arts. In this paper, we use observations of artists' creative work with babies to illustrate the relational elements of their listening practice. Artists worked through reciprocal interactions with babies, their families, other people in the spaces, the physical materials and qualities of the space, underpinning knowledge of the communities and their own identities as artists. These findings demonstrate that a relational orientation to children's rights is an essential aspect of participatory work in the very early years. However, while the need to understand interdependence, relationality and fluidity has been a key aspect of debates about children's participation rights for decades, an individualist image of the autonomous participating child continues to rear its head. By bringing the Voice of the Baby project into dialogue with international theorisations of children's participation rights—particularly from Majority World contexts—we argue that the tension between autonomous and relational understandings of the child creates a generative space for reflexivity and transparency about how very young children are being involved in conversations about their lives.