Earle, 2010). As Linda Finlay argued in her article trying to make sense of the opportunities and challenges of reflexivity in research practice, the researcher [me] is a ‘central figure who influences, if not actively constructs the collection, selection and interpretation of data’ (2002: 212). My ethnography of immigration detention in Greece draws on return visits (Baldassar, 2022). This is, however, not a longitudinal study per se; it was not designed as such from the beginning and it did not have a specific focus on time and change. After I had conducted my first piece of research inside a detention facility in Athens in 2011, nothing in my life, then, signalled that I would come back as a researcher five years later. Still, this longitudinal perspective remains informed by a rich and ongoing contextualisation. I have stepped in and out of the field, being back and forth between different capacities and created meaningful collaboration with other actors as part of my journey. In order to make my ethnographic trajectory clearer for the reader, I first explain the longterm aspect of the research drawing on the concept of ‘ethnographic returning’ (O’ Reilley, 2012) to describe the tools I used to form, shape and revisit older interviews and observations with new knowledge. I then move on to discuss the research questions that drove this project to justify the approach I took before turning to the methods, data collection and analysis I conducted. The next section focuses on positionality and the ethical implications and personal ambiguities of speaking for others. I have no doubt that some of the issues highlighted in this chapter reflect the naivety of being a novice researcher, a young practitioner and a white woman, so they are specific to my positionality(ies) and should not be regarded as generalised observations. Nevertheless, I hope that my experiences will be useful for other researchers grappling with similar questions. I conclude by putting this diverse long-term experience under one umbrella, that of telling a story about the horror of immigration detention in Greece through an abolitionist lens and what this means for knowledge production in the field of immigration detention. 37