a desire to understand better an institution that I simply want to learn more about. By bringing together a decade of involvement with immigration detention from multiple positions, this chapter addresses the advantages and pitfalls of starting out an extensive research journey with a deliberately unfinished roadmap. Below I briefly list the different research projects that are included in this piece of work, and in the following sections I address the practicalities and ethical challenges of my methods in action.20 This dissertation draws on four distinct pieces of work and research. These include fieldwork inside the central detention facility in Athens with staff, detained people, and other stakeholders, two periods of work with Greek NGOs, ongoing research with colleagues at the University of Oxford on monitoring and safeguarding human rights in immigration detention, and interviews and observations with a wide range of actors in the community, including (former) NGO workers, activists, lawyers and academics. These pieces of work and research correspond to around 120 hours of fieldwork and observation inside detention, 70 semi-structured interviews with detained women, detention staff and managers, NGO workers, policy-makers, charitable and volunteer workers, activists and journalists, 14 months as a social scientist inside a Greek detention centre, more than 950 informal conversations with detainees and staff, and detailed fieldnotes. This trajectory goes back to 2011, when I first entered the immigration detention field. As a research assistant for a project supported by the Oxford University Research Support Fund at the Faculty of Law as well as by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (led by Mary Bosworth and Sharon Pickering), I spent two months inside the central detention facility in Athens doing interviews with detained women, detention guards and other administrative officials and participant observation in the social and medical services section of the centre. This piece of research is weaved in throughout the empirical chapters. I particularly draw on the interviews I had with detention officers and other officials in trying to understand how staff make sense of the environment they work in. In March 2012, I began working at the only NGO that offered psychosocial and medical care to detained people. Over 14 months I was mainly based at the airport detention facility In view of good housekeeping and to avoid confusion about data originating from different periods, whenever I use quotes or fieldnotes, I put in brackets the year the interview was conducted or the year I took the fieldnotes and the location. When a quote or observation is signposted as ‘diary’, it means that I was not in a research capacity when I heard it or made the observation. Parts of previously (co)published articles that are reproduced are clearly identified. 20 39