Disabled Children's Childhood Studies: informing research and practice? Speaker: Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Disabled children's childhood studies present a paradigm shift away from the long-standing deficit discourses of disabled childhoods that have dominated Western culture and its reaches. Contemporary childhood studies have frequently contested normative, Eurocentric mantras that construct the standard child and disability studies have challenged the medical discourses of childhood and the scope of its authority. However, while drawing on these two approaches, the aim, here, is to demonstrate that disabled children's childhood studies offers more than a combined critique. Crucially, in disabled children's childhood studies, disabled children are not viewed as necessarily having problems or being problems but as having childhoods. The paper concludes by asking how the principles of disabled children's childhood studies might be reflected in contemporary contexts for research and practice with children, particularly in the light of the changes for children in England following the Children & Families Bill (2014).