In this paper, I explore conversations with teachers and parents at one Melbourne secondary school, as the modern definition of identity,defined at the end of the 1980s, took on thefluidity of post-modern definition a decadelater. Even as identification seemed contingent and negotiated, and difference seemed to disappear, teachers and parents continued tounderstand their identity in relation to
... [Show full abstract] the ambivalent definition of others. This became increasingly frightening as notions ofotherness, and therefore of self, becameincreasingly fluid and unclear. That which seemed other and outside, now appears aspart-of-us and inside-us-all. Even asdescriptions of difference, and thereforeidentity, become more fluid, conceptions of otherness – and therefore – self, do not disappear. Prescient manifestations of exclusion and racism are contiguous with, yet in juxtaposition to, older forms.