and my understandings (Gonzalez-Lopez, 2010). Gonzalez-Lopez uses the term ‘epistemologies of the wound’ (2010: 569) as a way of theorising both her own lived experience, her experience of the interviews, and the ways in which her participants understand and share their experiences. This is how I strived to make sense of it all. What seemed significant to me, as I was in the process of interviewing and having read a great deal of reports about the state of immigration detention facilities in the country, was the fact that there was such an agreement among different actors about the unfairness of the Greek immigration detention system. Yet, there seemed to be no tools available to try to understand better the inner workings of the system or willingness to change the status quo. In other words, if everyone thought detention sites were institutions marred by despair and dysfunction, then how could we explain their persistence and continuity through time? Drawing on my experiences I often wondered about the level of suffering I was exposed to. How can all this have been real? How can all this suffering have gone undocumented? Why is there not a public outcry about the life-threatening conditions that the authorities willingly put foreigners in Greece through? How can we account for state violence in a system that is constantly being monitored? It was with these questions that I began my research in earnest. As Ariana Markowitz argues in her article on methodology literature on emotion and trauma in social science research, ‘encounters with trauma can be edifying, fortifying us as researchers and as people as we strive to disrupt and dismantle violence’ (2021: 95). Engaging with trauma in research and the broader set of violences that compose the Greek detention system have been instrumental in thinking about change. Moving away from a reformist approach, the final question that I grapple with throughout the thesis is ‘Can this type of research allow for the capacity to imagine and enact a radical future in immigration detention?’. This is also the question that I ended all my interviews with. Inspired by the conception of abolition as method that shapes and informs the thinking and practice of people struggling for an equal and just society (Gilmore, 2022), as I wrote in the introduction, I was able to explore detention outside a methodological and analytical conservativism, as well as write about it with a sense of hope. bell hooks writes of hope as a process ‘To live by hope is to believe that it is worth taking the next step.’ (hooks, 2003). Critical border studies as abolitionist methodology have the potential to foster transformation of harmful border control practices. However, in line with Ruth Wilson 43