as distant as possible to avoid confusion about my role there. This became more pertinent when I would meet women or officers I had interviewed before, who questioned my presence there. To the officers, it meant that I had taken sides, against them. To the women that had participated in the study, it was unclear why I was still there and what the purpose of participant observation was. Nothing I observed was strictly speaking relevant to the theme of the research. Some days I was unsure what I was witnessing. Nevertheless, I spent my days taking notes of the silences, conversations, the relationships, the smells and the routines. I took notes while I was there but since it was not always easy, I often sat outside the detention centre or on the bus on the way home and reflected upon the day. Ethical considerations of fieldwork inside immigration detention Once inside, my identity as ‘the girl from the university’, was a mixed blessing. By emphasising my academic background, I leant authority to myself and projected a professional image, which were both very much needed in a male-dominated setting (Gurney, 1991). As Joan Gurney (1991) has written, to be a young female graduate student definitely affected my research experience in a male dominated setting (see also Bosworth and Slade, 2014). I was overtly exposed to sexism and experienced subtle forms of harassment, with some of the detention officers I interviewed suggesting we met for a coffee after their shift to discuss more about the theme of the research. I declined politely every time. Being an outsider ‘expert’ positioned me in the field as a ‘phenomenological stranger’ with license to ask ‘dumb questions’ (Sparkes, 1994). However, my positionality also raised expectations that I would provide answers. On many occasions, detention officers would ask my opinion about the financial crisis and the migration situation in the country. In other instances, participants appeared to want answers about whether I thought their overtly racist ideas were ‘right.’ Bosworth and Kellezi (2016) and Gerlach (2018) found they were questioned in a similar way during their time studying immigration detention. As I have explained elsewhere (Fili, 2018), afraid that an honest response would taint their trust and hamper my access to detainees, I remained most of the times silent, nodding along, as I listened to them. 51