My paper will examine some of the complex ways in which parents articulate and mobilize secondary school choices in connection with the reputation and distinction of different schools and in the context of competing racializing and pathologizing discourses situated within ethically diverse localities, places, spaces. A key objective of this paper is to invesitgate how places, spaces, institutions and personal relationships are implicated in the practice and constitution of 'local' discourses of school choice and the connection, if any, between ideology and discourse - as a form of practical action, instantiated in policy statements, in documents, newspapers, in conversations, accounts, and so on - and the formation of personal identities among parents of diverse ethnicities. The concept of race - like class - is posited as an unstable category of identification, making it susceptible to change and mutation across time and space - but which has 'real' material and symbolic consequences. Thus my approach to understanding the dynamics of parental choice maintains a dual concern with parents as agentic beings (i.e. possessing agency, some element of free will) whilst also recognising the location of parents (as individuals or groups) within wider social structures of power and inequality. Here my paper focuses on how parents of diverse ethnicities are drawn into (or largely avoid) discourses of race and class - as interpretative resources through which parents can negotiate the terms and conditions for a refusal or acceptance of different subject positions - and how this impacts on 'local' school choices.The data used in this paper will be taken from informal and open-ended interviews conducted by myself with different parents, teachers and head teachers. The data collected will be subjected to different types of thematic analysis, which uses post-structuralist and social constructionist approaches to the dissection of 'meaning' in data. Here I will provide a discursive reading of the different types of discourses - personal, familial, communal, professional, institutional, spatial, temporal and geographical - being practised and constituted by speakers in their discussions of school choice. Different approaches to understanding the data - such as narrative-discursive analysis, multi-sited research and cartographic strategies - will also be considered.My method of analysis takes as its starting point 'the figure of the parent as a contingent, contradictory and active concept which is bound to multiple, shifting, situated and interconnected knowledges, contexts, ideologies and discourses'. This paper then aims to highlight the connection (and disconnection) between places and spaces and the formation of individual and group identities. I will then identify the impact of these formations of identity on the selective practices of school choice among parents of diverse ethnicities.Archer, L. & Francis, B. (2007) Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement: Race, gender, class and 'success'; Routledge: OxonClarke, J. (2004) 'Creating Citizen-Consumers: the trajectory of an identity'. Paper prepared for CASCA Conference; London, Ontario, 5-9 May Crozier, G. & Reay, D. (eds) (2005) Activating Participation: Parents and Teachers Working Towards Partnership; Trentham Books: Stoke on Trent Gewirtz, S. (2001) 'Cloning the Blairs: New Labour's programme for the re-socialization of working class parents' in Journal of Education Policy 16 (4): 365-78 Giroux, H.A. (2003) 'Spectacles Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of Neoliberalism' in Communication Education 52: 191-211 Lewis, G. (2000) Race, Gender, Social Welfare: Encounters in a Postcolonial Society; Polity Press: Cambridge Omi, M. & Winant, H. (1986) Racial Formations in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s; Routledge: London and New York Reay, D. & Lucey, H. (2000) 'I Don't Really Like It Here But I Don't Want To Be Anywhere Else: Children and Inner City Council Estates' in Antipode 32 (4): 410-428 Reay, D. & Lucey, H. (2004) 'Stigmatised Choices: social class, social exclusion and secondary school markets in the inner city' in Pedagogy, Culture and Society 12 (1): 35-51 Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable; Sage: London Wetherell, M. & Potter, J. (1992) Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitmation of Exploitation; Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hertfordshire