that will expose the violence of institutions but ‘as a burden and somebody who merely uses valuable resources as she requires camp personnel to show her around.’ As other ethnographers urge, we need to normalize the productive place of failure in our fieldwork and within the neoliberal institutions most researchers operate in (Halberstam 2011; Harrowell et al., 2018). Rather than taking this failure as a block that could impede the research practice, I sought to engage with it and find ways to overcome it. Therefore, I shifted my focus to the outside world of detention (which was already part of my initial plan but not the focus). In the early stages of my PhD, I began compiling a list of potential interviewees in an excel spreadsheet, noting their relevance to the topic under study. In total, I sent out over 40 invitations to interview to policy makers, NGO staff, lawyers, activists, academics and journalists. My sampling was purposive because these particular individuals all had a spread of experience and expertise in the field of detention. As a result, my interviewees could shed light on different issues and offer multiple perspectives on a single question. In total I completed 21 interviews. Unlike fieldwork inside detention, interviews in the community were more straightforward ethically. Apart from two interviewees that I knew from before, all participants were invited by email, which included information about me and the project. Interviews were simpler because I did not experience language and cultural barriers. Most took place in cafes and did not leave me repleted. Both my interlocutors and I seemed legible to one another. All interviews were semi-structured and recorded. While I had divided the interview schedule into certain themes, I also tailored the interviews to the expertise of each person. As expected, though, in a highly politicised environment around migration and with a limited number of people working around detention issues, some of those I interviewed had concerns about being involved and repeatedly asked me to remove any identifiers. Aware of the effect this could have on their professional lives, when transcribing interviews, I took extra care to remove all identifying information. I gave each participant a pseudonym and although they did not have an issue with this, I decided not to mention the organisations they work(ed) at. As Aitken (2019) describes about his elite interviews, I also use generic titles for people (‘NGO practitioner, lawyer, etc). 56