the methodological perspectives and analytical tools to gain access to and knowledge from custodial institutions. However, scholars in this field, given the widespread nature of the populist anti-immigrant sentiment, have had to deal with very specific methodological, ethical and conceptual challenges (Fili, et al., 2018). Border criminology is usually qualitative, theoretically engaged and interdisciplinary. Its focus on the intersections between criminal justice and migration control leads to different topics, like justice (Drotbohm and Hasselberg, 2015), citizenship (Aliverti, 2013), race (Bosworth, Parmar and Vazquez, 2018), ethnicity (Bhui, 2016), sovereignty (De Genova and Peutz, 2010) and power (Bosworth, 2018). As Katja Aas and Mary Bosworth (2013) remind us, the central concepts of punishment and society need to be adjusted and rethought in the context of mass migration. This thesis, and in particular chapter 1, where I explore issues of positionality and the realities of doing research in a political environment, is further evidence that researchers in the field need to constantly reflect upon the impact of their interpersonal, political and institutional contexts within which their methodological decisions are shaped. In its predominantly theoretical bent, much of the prison and detention literature draws on Michel Foucault’s (1991; 2004) writings on governmentality and biopower, and Giorgio Agamben’s (1998; 2004) ideas of the state of exception and the Camp. This approach, though, presents a bleak view, with little space for fighting back. While my earlier writings were influenced by the concept of ‘bare life’, my choice not to engage with it in this thesis, is not solely motivated by intellectual concerns. The adoption (or not) of particular concepts reflects our personal and academic biographies. In attempting to dream of a reconfigured world, where borders (may exist) but do not define us, and detention centres are obsolete (Davis, 2003), I have looked elsewhere for inspiration. Abolition: the elephant in detention While the body of work described above is important in appreciating the textures and details of custodial institutions, often researchers, including myself, see immigration and detention as a race to the bottom (Canning, 2021). Immigration detention centres across the world are opaque places, entangled in emerging assemblages of bordered forms of penality, with prison-like, overcrowded and unhygienic conditions. Those that live inside them experience high levels of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, while 27