Network member wins researcher award

IN Child and Adolescent Research Centre Life with Mobility Disability (LIMO)funded by the Bevica Foundation and Roskilde University, Warming as research leader and Falster as PhD student have covered a huge gap in research so far by allowing children and young people with mobility impairments to speak for themselves.

In the project, Warming and Falster involve a wide group of children and young people with mobility disabilities — also groups that are usually difficult to include, for example, younger children and children and adolescents with disabilities that make communication difficult. In their research, they examine the everyday lives of children and young people, including what they experience from challenges and discrimination.

In addition to Falster's PhD thesis and a number of scientific papers, Warming and Falster are working on a practice-oriented book with accompanying videos, targeting educators, social workers, occupational therapists, nurses and other professional groups who work daily with children and young people with physical disabilities. The aim is that the professionals are trained to better support the opportunities of the target group in society.

In addition, Falster and Warming have been very active in disseminating insights from the project — not least through presentations at private organizations and municipalities as well as debate posts in national media — always with Improving the relationship of the target audience.

Warming and Falster have developed methods of working with 'double look'; an approach that focuses on the fact that conditions that are immediately perceived as a challenge can also potentially be a resource. This approach has been applied, among other things, to turn-on-headworkshops — partly with parents and professionals, partly with the children and young people themselves.

Despite the project's focus on children and young people, Warming and Falster's work contributes greatly to reshaping the way in which we generally relate to people who challenges the body norm. The project challenges the norm of physical fitness that characterizes our society and the sometimes invisible — but largely noticeable — discrimination against people with physical disabilities and the mechanisms underlying this discrimination.

Warming and Falster's research sets out alternatives and Focus on resources rather than limitations — for the benefit of people with physical disabilities.

“I am proud and honoured by the award,” says Emil.
“I see it as a recognition that through my research I have worked to overcome the shadow life that children with disabilities have found themselves in — where their perspectives on their own lives and the challenges and barriers that limit them from living a life on equal terms with everyone else have not been adequately taken into account.”

About Emil Søbjerg Falster

Emil Falster (b. 1992) is employed as a PhD Fellow at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University with the project “We Struggle to Live: A Social-Relational and Recognition Theoretical Analysis of Barriers to Children's Agency and Mutual Recognition Relationships from a Child Perspective”. The PhD thesis, which is expected to be submitted in 2021, constitutes an important sub-project of the research centre Life with Mobility Disability (LIMO), where Falster is expected to be employed as a postdoc after completion of his PhD.

About Hanne Warming

Hanne Warming (b. 1963) is Professor of Sociology and Childhood Research at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University. In addition to leading the research center Life with Mobility Disabilities Warming also heads the research group Social Dynamics and Change. Warming's research expertise includes children's everyday lives, child and adolescent involvement, educational and social work, social change, and sociological theory (including how sociological theories and analyses can both inform and be informed by childhood research), and methodology and ethics in research with children and adolescents.

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