decisions, ethical issues and challenges that span a decade. As Karen O’Reilly (2012b, p. 526) argues this ‘involves a reflexive awareness of one’s own primary experience and how it might impinge on one’s work’. More troublingly, a reflexive honesty accounted also for failings during the research. While I understand that this account might leave my or others’ work open to challenge, I prefer to see it as a way of accounting for emotional choices and ethical failures. To imply that challenging encounters such as the ones recounted in this chapter do not happen is to ensure that novice researchers and practitioners are not prepared or equipped to face them. It hides emotionally and intellectually demanding components of our work in the field. I have, thus, taken to writing about my experiences in order to help make sense of them and what they might suggest for the role of academic scholarship and the third sector in places of confinement. Ethnographically returning to the same field, understood broadly as the immigration detention system in Greece, but often to the same sites too, in this case the Petrou Ralli detention facility, has made it impossible to ignore social change and social processes at work. I have been able to experience immigration detention under four different governments, through numerous legislation changes, and influenced by the role of global developments, such as, inter alia, wars, sociopolitical emergencies, and the crisis of 2015. Despite the documented changes, my own ethnographic returning, drawing on a wide range of rich data, developed over time, and through many return visits has finally allowed me to process and document the continuum of immigration detention in Greece over the years (Fili, 2016); namely, the endurance of its extensive use in migration management and its unquestionable violent nature while employed in practice. The alteration of capacities in which I returned every time contributed to a blurring of here and there, attachment and distance, helping me to avoid uncritical and generalised observations (O’Reilly, 2012a). By referring to the roles I have used to approach detention, I do not claim a single vantage point or an authoritative voice but rather show my own implication in knowledge production (Mazzei and Jackson, 2009). This chapter, then, is intended as a roadmap through which the rest of the thesis can be read. 64