ABSTRACT
Youth work concerns itself a great deal with young people’s identity development. Indeed, helping youth “develop” is an implicit, and often explicit, intention of all youth work. Skills are attached to identities; youth can export skills from one identity to another. Social construction offers youth workers a philosophical stance that aligns with the liberatory intentions of the field of youth work. Youth work informed by social construction is interested in helping young people avoid totalizing descriptions of themselves based only on the disability or disease that impacts them. Individualism leads to a certain kind of talk. Conversations within the framework of individualism are often thought of as transmitting information from one person to another, or as an exchange of information. Within an individualist framework, social/relational complexities and context go largely overlooked in favor of a focus on what goes on “inside” of individual persons.
