The following day I was feeling nervous. Fieldworkers often describe the shock of entering a new environment and their struggles to get to grips with ways of being that are unfamiliar or unsettling. I knew no one in Petrou Ralli, and as an outsider I expected to encounter some suspicion or hostility towards me. The sense of confusion, though, that detention researchers feel when they first arrive is not just a reflection of the difficulties of stepping into a new environment populated by strangers. Rather, it is an indication that these are important characteristics of the immigration detention estate itself (Bosworth 2014). In this case, the staff were polite and generally appeared eager to help. A young female detention officer, who seemed quite senior in rank, quickly assumed the role of my facilitator. As I would later find out, during my interview with her, she was well-known among migrants, even outside the centre, for being ‘one of the good ones’. As others who have done research inside detention have explained, being friendly with detention officers caused me anxiety as I worried the women would be less trusting of me (Bosworth, 2014; Gerlach, 2018). Once inside, I was afforded a significant degree of freedom to conduct my research. Yet, unsurprisingly, there were many restrictions. Unlike UK researchers with access to detention centres, who were given keys to facilitate their movement around the centre (Bosworth, 2014; Gerlach, 2018; Aitken, 2019), I had to go through three different levels of security and multiple identity checks. In additions, in search of a private room to conduct interviews with the women, the officers on duty said that, for security reasons, I had two options; either the visiting area or the staff’s operation control office. As the former was out of the question for me because it would require speaking to the women through a stained glass (see figure 5 above), the latter was an uncomfortable and inevitable choice. It was a spacious office with no windows, with a couple of large tables, lockers where staff would deposit their staff and a CCTV system, from where the police could monitor what has happening in the detention wings. The next issue that had to be dealt with was recruitment. To advertise the project, in accordance with my ethics clearance, I had information flyers with me and asked the police to distribute them to the women. They willingly did so, but Xenia, my self-proclaimed facilitator, assured me that no one would come forward. First, because they might not be able to read Greek or English (the languages of the information sheets) and second, 48