Early teen-work assemblages and embedded dependence

Abstract

This chapter aims to trouble the common linkage often made between work, independence and adulthood by emphasizing how young workers are embedded in human and non-human collectivities of interwoven dependences. We focus on two 16-year-old participants from conventional interview and photo elicitation interview data with 32 Canadian young people discussing their first part-time jobs, to we recognize how our participants, and indeed all of us, are embedded ‘in the midst of an open-ended swirl of extensions and supplementations’ (Lee 2001, 115). These entangled dependences can activate privilege; they also bolster the illusion of individual independence and autonomy. The intent of this chapter is to work with ideas from Actor Network Theorist Nick Lee and from Deleuze and Guattari to reveal this illusion, for we are all enmeshed in dependency. We particularly focus on four components of teen-work assemblages: family; time, space and bodies; tools/machinery, practices and roles; and capitals/money.