In our contemporary societies, the coexistence of populations from numerous cultural origins and their access to a national citizenship is progressively formed as a central question. Education – and, more particularly, schooling – of young generations constitutes an essential issue of this challenge and emerges as a necessary instrument to their citizen's, social and cultural emancipation.

As part of this international meeting, this communication discusses the cultural practices of youth with immigrant origins within their youth sociability and on the self-defining involvements which are linked there. Subjacent question is to wonder about the role of the school institution in the process of social integration of young people coming from immigration. At methodological level, this doctoral research sets up in different schools of Brussels chosen according to their position on " the school market ". This communication introduces a comparative study of the type of sociability at work according to “favourable” or disadvantageous school situations (Verhoeven, 2002).
Our theoretical frame is built on the presuppositions of the interactionnist approach to develop a sociological reflection from key concepts such as "ethnicity", "identity strategies ", or still " youth sociability". This statement is structured on two main points : (1) on the self-defining plan we will observe the negotiation of different cultural repertoires of youth coming from immigration ; (2) in terms of social relations, we will study the processes of affiliation and differentiation between the peers across the activation of these different systems of cultural referents.

First of all, on the individual plan, the study of self-defining strategies allows to include how these young people mobilize and choose the different cultural referents of their identity to increase their chances of integration in the “host society”. To study the transformations which affect self-defining of young people, the question of identity is studied according to a multidimensional approach. This one takes into account the contemporary individual as a product of his different social experiences.
The second point concerns the ethnicity processes and the role it plays in the process of social organization of the cultural difference within the peer group. This concept is also built on two dimensions which allow each to study the processes of social construction of the ethnic groups (Barth, 1969; Jenkins, 1997). The first dimension, the relational approach, concerns the operations of classification, of categorization and ways of self-presentation. The substantial approach (second dimension) concerns the mobilization of varied cultural repertoires, the re-appropriation of some mass culture’s features by the youth, or the emergence of a young "culture intermezzo" (Back, 1996).

Therefore, if the school relations are intensively taken in a cultural dimension, we want to understand how culture is invested by the young people in their mutual relations. These cultural practices and their linked worlds of signification appear as powerful stations in the structuring of their daily. These constitute different cultural resources of youth sociability. In more heterogeneous school contexts, these reference systems give schemas of understanding and help guiding the young people in their social behaviors.