consuming. Second, this was not a linear PhD project but included research that was not even designed by me, and was a decade old, as well as experiences that I was even struggling to make sense of, as I explain above. Third, by putting diverse material and experiences into NVivo categories and boxes felt unnatural. Following Bosworth (2014), who took a similar decision when analysing her research data from immigration detention, I decided to follow a more natural anthropological approach. To begin with, I re-read old interviews, fieldnotes, and diaries from when I was working inside detention. Then I carefully read the new interviews. At that point I created ‘loosely called coding strategies’ (Bosworth, 2014: 82) and identified broad themes and patterns that included key words, like violence, fear, complicity, monitoring and resistance. As my writing progressed, I re-read all the available material numerous times and cut and pasted quotes and/or descriptions in separate files I had created for each chapter. Evidently, I may have missed important elements. However, this (un)systematic approach to the volume of material at hand, seemed reflective of the messiness of ethnographic research. Without a level of flexibility in the method of analysis, the tension of immigration detention cannot be grasped. Conclusion Burying the messiness of qualitative ethnographic work, crafts an illusion that “good” research is being done by “good researchers.” As I have argued, throughout this chapter, though, this is not representative of the life and struggles of a researcher behind the words that readers find on the screen or paper. Although this thesis draws on many sources, I do not claim to present the truth about the detention system in Greece. What is more, despite striving to make ethical decisions and moral choices throughout the PhD, I am aware this project is not ethically perfect. My account of immigration detention is a subjective snapshot of my positionalities and the way that I have reflected upon them over the years (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000). In bringing together a diverse set of experiences and a large volume of data, this thesis makes an original contribution to the literature on immigration detention, but also on qualitative research inside such environments. This chapter has been an exercise in reflexivity, one that ‘requires subjecting to critical and ongoing scrutiny the relationship between the researcher and the researched, and to consider how – in a variety of ways – this shapes the knowledge produced by the research.’ (Benson and O’Reilly, 2020, p. 3). In this sense, this has not been an easy chapter to write, for it entailed openness and honesty about all the stages of the research process. What is more, the longitudinal aspect of this research project meant that I had to draw together 63