Practitioner research or researching practice? The above may not have been straightforward ethically, but it is ethnographic research, most researchers who want to understand the social world engage with. What I explore below, is at once one of the elements that make this thesis unique, but also an ethical and methodological puzzle. For how can you define and analyse something that you did not know was researching at the time of practice? Practitioner research usually refers to research within ‘a professional field that is carried out by practitioners, who are personally involved with the professional practices, actions and activities of the field’ (Heikkinen et al., 2016: 3). This type of research is particularly popular in education, social work and applied sciences. While there have been some whistleblowers’ account from within immigration detention, especially in the Australian context (Essex, 2020), we know little about the life and work of NGO practitioners in these settings. Literature on the third sector inside detention worldwide is generally rare and it often involves critical accounts of the services offered (Briskman and Zion, 2014; Tyler, et al., 2014). While, due to the lack of access, some ethnographers have managed to enter detention through their usually (voluntary) work with service providers (Griffiths, 2013; Fischer, 2015), the accounts discuss the ethics of this involvement in passing. Autobiographical accounts are even scarcer (Boochani, 2019). What I am describing below has been neither here nor there. It is not practitioner research because when I was a practitioner, I was not actively a researcher. The ethical concerns, though, are not dissimilar to action research (Heikkinen et al., 2016). Furthermore, it is not an autobiography as my account is more than about myself. Therefore, in trying to bring to life my experience of working inside the Greek detention system for 14 months, I had very little to turn to. First, I describe the experience, alongside the practical difficulties and then discuss the ethical implications of considering this as research. I was part of a multi-disciplinary team, comprised of myself as a social scientist, a psychologist and a doctor. We visited the airport detention centre 5 days a week and were responsible for offering medical care and psychosocial services to all those detained in the centre. The NGO had been offering similar services to all the detention centres in Athens at the time, so they had a working relationship with the police. My role included completing the intake screening of all new arrivals to the centre. To do so, I used a form, the NGO 58