Locating the data across time Having had previous experiences in the Greek immigration detention sector, both as an NGO practitioner and a researcher, my PhD application tapped into those in order to build a research proposal. My initial proposal sought to illuminate the ongoing struggles of women detained in Greece to resist bare life, as well as their constant dialogue with the detention system and those enmeshed within it. My idea was to do a restudy of the Petrou Ralli detention centre, with an emphasis on how the situation had changed, but more importantly, to point out what had not changed and why. Yet, while I had included my experience as an asset to the project, particularly in terms of acquiring access to detention, I initially did not think of including my previous work into any part of the process, e.g. the design, collection of data and the analysis. It was only after I had the first meeting with my supervisors, who strongly encouraged me to bring both my academic involvement and my work on the ground as sources that would be analysed along with new research I was about to begin for the PhD. Therefore, I started thinking about the different ways that these diverse sources could inform my understanding of the field and what this would mean for the production of knowledge. The result of bringing diverse experiences together spanning many years certainly includes the qualities of a longitudinal perspective but since the design I came up with did not include the same cohort of people (apart from one detention manager whom I interviewed three times) or any repeat interviews, nor was it designed as longitudinal from the outset, it needed another conceptual and methodological framework. Following the work of Karen O’Reilly (2012a), who described her ongoing work with British migration to Spain as ‘ethnographic returning’, I argue that the empirical chapters that follow present an ethnography of the Greek immigration detention system drawing on a number of return visits to the field and a lasting involvement with the field of confinement that I have always been fascinated by as I mention in the beginning of this chapter. As O’Reilly, beautifully writes ‘this is not simply ‘walking alongside’ nor is it immersion; it is engaging, as people engage in anything, with part of who they are’ (2012a: 521). In paraphrasing Leanne Weber (2018), who writes about her exploratory project on globalization and the policing of internal borders, in this long-term research project, I am ‘taking the immigration detention system for a walk’.19 This approach links my private and academic life and it springs from In her chapter for the book ‘Criminal justice research in an era of mass mobility’, Leanne Weber, writes about ‘taking the border for walk’, taking from artist Paul Klee, who famously described drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’. 19 38