This paper illustrates how superdiverse youth negotiate their identity in everyday interactions during Australia’s Covid-19 outbreak. The discussion is based on oral narratives collected from classroom conversations among international and local students living in Australia. The paper illustrates how participants position themselves and others in narratives, how these positionings reveal complex identity work among youth from diverse backgrounds and how identities are constructed and negotiated through stories about everyday encounters. Students’ experiences of racism and microaggressions point to interethnic interactions as sites of struggle where identities come into conflict. The paper contributes to current work on identity in narrative discourse and narratives of racism.
AugoustinosMEveryD (2010) Accusations and denials of racism: Managing moral accountability in public discourse. Discourse & Society21(3): 251–256.
2.
AugoustinosMReynoldsKJ (2001) Understanding Prejudice, Racism, and Social Conflict. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE.
3.
BambergM (1997) Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life history7(1-4): 335–342.
4.
BambergMGeorgakopoulouA (2008) Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text and Talk28(3): 377–396.
5.
BaynhamM (2006) Performing self, family and community in Moroccan narratives of immigration and settlement. In: De FinaASchiffrinDBambergM (eds) Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.376–397.
6.
BlommaertJ (2009) Language, asylum and the national order. Current Anthropology50(4): 415–441.
7.
BucholtzMHallK (2005) Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies7(4–5): 585–614.
8.
DaviesBHarréR (1990) Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour20: 43–63.
9.
DayDKjaerbeckS (2013) ‘positioning’ in the conversation analytic approach. Narrative Inquiry23(1): 16–39.
10.
De FinaA (2009) Narratives in interview—The case of accounts: For an interactional approach to narrative genres. Narrative Inquiry19(2): 233–258.
11.
De FinaA (2015) Narrative and Identities. In: FinaADGeorgakopoulouA (eds) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell Publishing, pp.349–368.
12.
De FinaAGeorgakopoulouA (2008) Analysing narratives as practices. Qualitative Research8(3): 379–387.
13.
De FinaASchiffrinDBambergM (2006) Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14.
de KlerkVBarkhuizenG (2006) Imagined identities: Preimmigrants’ narratives on language and identity. International Journal of Bilingualism10: 277–299.
15.
DziedzicSYangS (2021) Chinese Australians discriminated against as Canberra-Beijing tensions boil over: Lowy report. ABC News, 3March.
16.
GeorgakopoulouA (2002) Narrative and identity management: Discourse and social identities in a tale of tomorrow. Research on Language and Social Interaction35(4): 427–451.
17.
GoffmanE (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
18.
GoffmanE (1981) Forms of talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
19.
HarréRvan LangenhoveL (1991) Varieties of positioning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour21(4): 393–407.
20.
HatossA (2012) Where are you from? Identity construction and experiences of ‘othering’ in the narratives of Sudanese refugee-background Australians. Discourse & Society23(1): 47–68.
21.
HatossA (2019) Unpacking monolingual ideologies: Voices of young Sydneysiders of mixed backgrounds. In: ChikABensonPMoloneyR (eds) Multilingual Sydney. London and New York: Routledge, pp.13–25.
22.
HatossA (2023) Everyday multilingualism: Linguistic landscapes as practice and pedagogy. London/New York: Routledge.
23.
LabovW (2010) Narratives of personal experience. In: HoganPC (ed.) Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.546–548.
24.
LabovW (2016) Afterword: Where are we now?Journal of Sociolinguistics20(4): 581–602.
25.
LabovWWaletzkyJ (1967) Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In: HelmJ (ed) Essays on verbal and visual arts: Proceedings of the 1966 annual spring meeting of the American ethnological society, pp.12-44. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press.
26.
MapedzahamaVKwansah-AidooK (2017) Blackness as Burden? The lived experience of black Africans in Australia. Sage Open7(3): 1–13.
27.
OchsECappsL (1996) Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology25: 19–43.
28.
OchsECappsL (2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.
29.
PerrinoS (2015) Chronotopes: Time and space in oral narrative. In: De FinaAGeorgakopoulouA (eds) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.140–159.
30.
PlonerJ (2017) Resilience, moorings and international student mobilities – Exploring biographical narratives of social science students in the UK. Mobilities12(3): 425–444.
31.
Relaño PastorAM (2010) Ethnic categorization and moral agency in ‘fitting in’ narratives among Madrid immigrant students. Narrative Inquiry20(1): 82–105.
32.
Relaño PastorAMDe FinaA (2005) Contesting social place; narratives of language conflict. In: BaynhamMDe FinaA (eds) Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, pp.36–60.
33.
RibeiroBT (2006) Footing, positioning, voice: Are we talking about the same things? In: De FinaASchiffrinDBambergM (eds) Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.48–82.
34.
Rojas-SosaD (2016) The denial of racism in Latina/o students’ narratives about discrimination in the classroom. Discourse & Society27(1): 69–94.
35.
SchiffrinD (2006) In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press.
36.
UdahH (2018) ‘not by default accepted’: The African experience of othering and being othered in Australia. Journal of Asian and African Studies53(3): 384–400.
37.
van DijkTA (1992) Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse & Society3(1): 87–118.
38.
VertovecS (2001) Transnationalism and identity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies27(4): 573–582.
