Images as method Upon permission from the police, I was allowed to take images from two detention centres, the airport facility and Petrou Ralli.28 This took place under the framework of our monitoring visits together with the Greek NPM, which possibly afforded us, the unknown researchers, some credibility and trust. These two largely obscure centres have never been documented in such a way before, so these images are a rare account of what these facilities look like.29 After a presentation at a conference in Athens, where I showed some of the pictures, a lawyer, who had long-term experience in immigration detention, came up to me and thanked me because he had never seen the inside of the facilities he was visiting on a weekly basis. Of course, the images do not include the people who are subject to these conditions but I cannot exclude the possibility of them becoming a triggering effect for some readers.30 Yet, this ‘digital walkthrough’ makes ‘these, often, secret lived realities more ‘real’ and less unknown.’ (Turnbull, 2015). As other academics, who have used visual representations as a form of documentation, argue, images are powerful tools to narrate stories and raise awareness but also serve as an embodied remembering of the spaces the researcher has witnessed (Turnbull, 2015; Esposito, 2015; Gariglio, 2018; Bosworth et al., 2020).31 In the thesis, I use some of these images to offer a perspective on the interior of these establishments when I think this is appropriate for the reader. Analysing data in hindsight While in the first phase of my research, I was barely aware of qualitative data analysis packages, during the second phase, I had heard so many researchers swearing by NVivo that I decided to take a course on it during my PhD. The course was useful and I could definitely see the benefits of using such an approach. However, the peculiarities of this research project made me quickly think that this would be ill-fitted for my purposes for three reasons. First, the volume of the material would make the task extremely timeImages were taken either by myself or my colleagues Hindpal Bhui and Gabriella Morris. See Bhui et al. (2019). 29 Ergon Eksivrisi (2007) and Iliadi (2015) have recreated in drawings the inside of these detention centres based on trstimonies by people who have been detained or worked there. 30 For a discussion on ethical questions of visual methods see Carrabine (2012) and Batchen, et al. (2012). 31 The Immigration Detention Archive, put together by Mary Bosworth and Khadija von Zinnenbrug, is a unique a digital and physical collection, of objects made in detention and documents about these sites of confinement. It currently houses several thousand pages of bureaucratic documents and 30 letters, 3000 photographs, 400 drawings and over 70 other art works and materials gathered during fieldwork and art workshops. More information is available here https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subjectgroups/immigration-detention-archive. Material from the archive can also be found here, Bosworth, von Zinnenburg and Balzar (2020). 28 62