Martin’s statement introduces the last empirical chapter of the book where I explore how several aspects of children’s social positionality and their perceptions thereof intertwine with their everyday practices. While in the previous chapters the significance of children’s age or gender was among the key circumstances that affected what the children did, this chapter primarily explores how such notions (and ethnicity) emerge in discourses among and towards the children, how children performatively negotiate the social constructions of their identity traits, and how both the discursive and embodied negotiations of social identity act as extensions to children’s agency. I am interested in how issues such as children’s relative age, gender and ethnicity emerge through everyday discourses, but also how such discourses circulate and affect children’s embodied actions, and how they are contested, negotiated or reinforced both in children’s understandings and practices.

Theoretically, the chapter is inspired by what Foucault (1985) called the ‘practice of the self ‘, a reflective set of practices that establish a human subject and which are both situated in a dynamic set of conditions and actively seek to re-shape them. Sharp et al (2000) argued that in Foucault’s later work: ‘something of a gap does open up between discourse and practice, between scripted invocations of what embodied selves should be like and the particular performances of selves that individuals fabricate in their everyday lives’ (2000, p.19). The view that the contacts between discourses, power relations and individual embodied practices are constituted through everyday performances, and therefore that to acknowledge them adequately requires understanding their spatial and temporal dimensions, is central also for how I employ this framework and how Chapter Eleven connects with the rest of the book. I will explore the moments when children establish and perform a sense of themselves against the notions of identity which they are assigned within their social relationships and within discourses produced by other people.