ABSTRACT
Michael White noted that conventional language practices informed by the modernist notion of an essential “self” collapse problems onto people’s identities. Externalizing is an alternative language practice that locates problems in the social world where people are in relationship with them. Specifically, externalizing conversations involve separating people from problems, both conceptually and linguistically. Externalizing conversations help youth expose systems of oppression and reclaim their identities from problem-saturated stories that disregard context and power relations. Personifying or anthropomorphizing ideas typically understood as characteristics or qualities core to who people are directly challenges our conventional conversational practices. In addition to naming problems and having externalizing conversations that track youth’s relationships with them, ask youth questions that help them further personify the problem. Winslade and Monk suggest that externalizing conversations are parodies of our dominant culture’s “deficit thinking that pathologizes people and requires that they embrace a sense of hopelessness, shame, or guilt”.
