| Abstract
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This ethnographic study examines the processes of identity negotiation among immigrant children at a Cypriot public primary school. It particularly focuses on the ways in which children situate themselves in, through, and across contexts (the home, the school, the playground) of their everyday lives, and on the resources upon which they draw to negotiate their identity. Findings of this study suggest that unlike popular adult perceptions of children as adults-in-the-making, children are social actors capable of sophisticated understandings of the social world around them and of elaborate performativities. Life at Mesogeios Elementary was embedded in the interaction of structure, power, and agency. Marginalized and positioned at the very bottom of a hierarchy of Greekness established by the dominant Greek Cypriot majority and embodied in the discourses and actions of their peers and teachers, immigrant children of Pontian background negotiated their positionality at Mesogeios by moving between the public and the private sphere. Children drew on their own lived experiences across countries, on their parents' experience of immigration and self-identification, on their social networks, and on the group's collective memory of dislocation to blur representations of identity as static, monolocal, and bounded within the nation-state. Through these processes, Pontian children's selves-in-practice emerged as different performativities in different contexts which allowed them to author their own spaces, and negotiate identities that were diasporic, multi- and translocal, and chronotopic.
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