but I had the opportunity to visit and work at all the detention establishments in the region of Attica. Continuing my role as an NGO practitioner at a different organisation and setting for another two years, further unmasked the inhumanity that is obscured in humanitarian assistance programmes for immigrants and refugees (Barbara Harrell-Bond, 2002). This rich experience has deeply informed my analysis and has been at the core of chapter 5, where I engage with the role of non-state actors in forming and nurturing immigration detention. In 2016, I began as a research assistant at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, working inside the structures of the nascent research group, Border Criminologies, founded by Mary Bosworth.21 From 2016 until 2019, I was involved with a wider project, led by Mary Bosworth and Hindpal Bhui, that focused on the issue of monitoring immigration detention in countries particularly affected by high levels of migration.22 This project had three phases; the first was exploratory, trying to understand the political and migration policy context in each country visited, the way detention was used and the structure and history of detention monitoring. The later phases aimed to investigate the conditions in detention and the nature of human-rights based monitoring within detention centres through shadowing monitoring visits.23 In doing so, this project involved multiple detention visits across Greece and following the work of Greek monitors. At the end of each project, all members of the team shared our fieldnotes with each other as a means to build conversations around each other’s observations and reflections (Cury, 2015). The end result of this collaborative practice were the reports that have been published (Bhui et al, 2018; 2019). Insights from these projects inform chapter 4 that aims to explore the role of independent monitoring and its effects in safeguarding human rights inside immigration detention. In October 2017, I started my PhD at Lancaster University. Under this role, and reflecting my unsuccessful attempt to acquire access to detention sites, which I will discuss later in the chapter, I had interviews with a wide range of actors in the community, including I later became the managing editor of the Border Criminologies blog and also the manager of the network’s website content and social media channels. 22 The individual schemes, part of this general project, were funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account at the University of Oxford and the Open Society Foundations. The projects had ethical clearance from the University of Oxford’s Research Ethics Committee. 23 During the first phase, we visited Turkey, Greece, Italy and Hungary. The second phase focused on Greece and Turkey and the third included visits to Greece and Italy. 21 40