Being let in the activist world was particularly challenging. Solidarity groups in Greece and anarchist groups operate in an aggressive political environment, where at best they are considered pariahs and at worst are persecuted for their beliefs. They are particularly wary of all media and most of them would not engage with them, at least openly. Approaching them for my research was not dissimilar to strategies used towards closed institutions. Again, contacts here were valuable. Through one of my good friends, who is involved with a number of open assemblies I got the email of one of her acquaintances. Following months after the first email and consequent message texts, we met at a squat building in Athens. In the beginning she was very cautious and suspicious. She explained to me their precarious position as a group and the number of dangers they would face if she openly spoke to me. As my friend had advised, I did not bring with me any of the consent forms but instead explained to her the scope of the project, offered my reassurances about confidentiality and anonymity and also expressed my allegiances to their struggles. Following verbal consent, we started the interview. She gradually felt more relaxed and at the end of the 3-hour interview she seemed satisfied with my approach and said she would speak about me and the project to her comrades. I ended up interviewing her another couple of times and further interviewed one of her good friends. Fieldwork in the community offered me a distance from previous feelings of being too close to the field, as related above, and a chance to do ethnography ‘from nearby’ but not from the inside (Papataxiarchis, 2010). Through interviewing actors that they themselves kept a distance from detention by not having regular presence inside the centres, I was able to put to test my pre-conceived assumptions and observations about the detention system. In other words, I went into the interviews, clean, having made the already familiar ‘strange’, asking simple questions about the purpose of the detention system for example. What is more, by interviewing people I had worked with, I navigated the ethical slippery slope of basing my analysis entirely on my experiences, for I had the chance to triangulate the occurrence of incidents I was a witness of. In other words, I put into practice what Pierre Bourdieu (2003) calls ‘participant objectivation’, i.e., the process of questioning my own unconscious biases or prejudices. Furthermore, as research proceeded, I developed questions based on previous discussion or something another interviewee had mentioned. As with any research project, I thought I could have interviewed more people and was hesitant to stop fieldwork. My supervisors advised me to stop because they thought I had enough data to start analysing. 57