We report on interviews with very young Canadian workers regarding their first jobs, with a focus on why they started working, the rewards and risks of their work, and their familial supports. Our participants were largely positive about their early work experiences, although they also raised concerns, e.g. about safety. We reflect on three interrelated themes emerging from their accounts: competence and vulnerability, independence and dependence, and protection and under-protection.

Working Holiday programs have been identified as an increasingly significant source of temporary migrant labor for several wealthy states. This case study adds to limited work on this phenomenon in the Canadian context by offering a partial chronology of Irish Working Holiday migration to Canada and a critical analysis of Canadian government discourse that positioned Irish migrants as not only “culturally compatible” but also part of white settler Canadianness thus making them desirable workers and potential future immigrants. The Canadian case study raises questions about how Working Holiday and related youth mobility programs may be linked to classed and racialized migration and dominant ideologies of nationalized belonging

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Participant-generated photo-elicitation usually involves inviting participants to take photographs, which are then discussed during a subsequent interview or in a focus group. This approach can provide participants with the opportunity to bring their own content and interests into research. Following other child and youth researchers, we were drawn to the potential of participantgenerated photo-elicitation to offer a methodological counterweight to existing inequalities between adult researchers and younger participants. In this article, we reflect on our use of one-on-one, participant-generated photo-elicitation interviews in a Canadian-based research project looking at young people's earliest paid work. We discuss some of the challenges faced when it came to gaining institutional ethics approval and also report on how the method was unexpectedly but productively altered by participants' use of publicly accessible Internet images to convey aspects of their work. Overall, we conclude that participantgenerated photo-elicitation democratized the research process and deepened our insights into young people's early work and offer some recommendations for future photo-elicitation research.