The processes of educational decision making and identity formation lie at the heart of the ethnographic study that explores the narratives of 23 young people aged 16-19 with migrant and non-migrant background, namely of Greek, Albanian, Georgian and Palestinian ethnicities. The present paper focuses on the 12 migrant participants attending two upper secondary Lyceums in Greece, one sub-urban Vocational and one inner-city Comprehensive. The educational choices these young people are called to make are situated within the broader socio-economic and discursive milieu and within the structural arrangements of the specific post-16 institutional landscape in Greece. Choices are viewed as embedded within varied socio-economic, cultural, political and discursive contexts and as formed and reformed by this intricate and manifold set of powers. Decisions are thought to be made in a unique, for each individual, matrix weaved by opportunities and constraints, resources and the lack of it, power and powerlessness.

Identities are conceptualized as being produced, negotiated and contested in a shifting interactional context through the interplay of social positions, heterogeneous capitals (Bourdieu, 1987), transforming individual habituses (Bourdieu, 1990a;1990b;1992) and the institutional habituses ( McDonough, 1997; Reay, 1998) of the two schools. In specific, central role is attributed to the notion of habitusas embodying the complex interweaving of dispositions, structured discourses, collective and individual histories. It is argued that the processes of activation and re-conversion of capitals (economic, social, cultural and symbolic) in which young people engage, along with the dynamic change of habitus in the face of new conditions in the host country, can be a useful conceptual schema for understanding the ways migrant urban youths experience and make sense of their positioning in social space in terms of their social class, ethnic group, gender. In more detail, the subjective felt social class position is analyzed as perceived and discoursively performed by the young participants. In this frame, analytical attention is paid to the economic resources, the cultural capital and the habitus that the family they belong to transmit to them in relation to their schooling and their future academic and occupational planning.

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