The processes of educational decision making and formations of identity lie at the heart of the
present thesis that explores the narratives of twenty-three young people with migrant and nonmigrant
background. The thesis analyzes the cases of eleven Greek and twelve migrant
participants, of Albanian, Georgian, Armenian and Palestinian ethnicities attending two upper
secondary Lyceums in Greece, one sub-urban Vocational and one inner-city Comprehensive
located in the city of Thessaloniki. The narratives of young people are analyzed as performative
acts and as social practices constructed locally and intersubjectively, rather than as expressions
of their essentialist realities.The narrative analysis aims more specifically at demonstrating
empirically the social conditionings of school choice and the intricate ways that decision-making
is cross-cut by and implicated in the processes of identity formation and negotiation. The
educational choices these young people are called to make are situated within the broader socioeconomic
and discursive milieu and within the structural arrangements of the post-16
institutional landscape of Greece. The issue of youth agency as grappling against the structural
limitations of a given milieu, with its cultural particularities is at the backdrop of the present
qualitative study. Young people’s identities are conceptualized as being produced, negotiated
and contested in a shifting context through the interactions with significant others, namely their
peers, teachers and families and through the interplay of identifications, social positions, capitals,
transforming individual habituses and the institutional contexts of the two schools. In more
detail, the subjectively felt classed, ethnic and gendered positions are analyzed as perceived,
invested and discoursively performed by the young participants. Central role is attributed to the
notion of habitus as embodying the complex interweaving of dispositions, discourses, collective
and individual histories. It is argued that the processes of activation and re-conversion of capitals
(economic, social, cultural) in which young people engage, along with the dynamic change of
habitus in the face of evolving conditions in the host country, can be a potentially useful
conceptual schema for understanding the ways migrant and non-migrant young people
experience and make sense of their positioning in social space. The processes of drawing
distinctions between perceived others and themselves mediate the ways young people engage in
the weaving of their identities through a more or less ascribed, constrained and perpetually
negotiated sense of belonging. In addition analytical attention is paid to the parental engagement
and in particular the resources and dispositions that young people’s families invest and transmit
in relation to their schooling and their academic and occupational future. In this frame the
narrated educational choices are embedded in young people’s learner identities and familial
histories and are closely linked with their projections and envisioning of the future. To conclude,
the decision-making dynamics emerge through a matrix weaved by differing resources, positions
and dispositions that grant young people with unequal opportunities for constructing selfnarratives
and engaging with school choice
