beneficial but may also blind to the most obvious and self-evident, yet most important aspects of life in the field (Papataxiarchis, 2010). Feelings of burnout, disillusionment and compassion fatigue are common among aid workers, who work in distressing contexts and face increasing demands they cannot resolve (Cardozo et al., 2012); qualitative researchers encounter similar issues in the field (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007). After a few months I sought to spend as little time in the centre as possible and went home every day feeling exhausted; I found it unbearable to be confronted with my own powerlessness in the face of so much hardship. Elsewhere, I have described detention centres in Greece as mazes which trap those within (Fili, 2013). To return to this metaphor, I want to argue that as mazes they often trap those working inside these institutions too. This trap echoes the anxiety of speaking for others (Alcoff, 1995), as practitioners are also constrained by the everyday realities of detention centres and the policing culture they have internalised (Fili, 2018). Although the impact of border controls on immigrants is well documented, little has been written about the implications of border restrictions on practitioners working with such populations. As Victoria Canning (2021) reports vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue are common among these workers. This, in turn, is reflected in the level of care they are able to offer. Practitioners, Canning (2021) argues, often alluded to a loss of faith in humanitarianism. During my time at the airport detention facility, I had informal conversations with more than 950 detained immigrants. With some of them, I spoke in-depth about their lives in Greece and their dreams about their future. Most of them were young men searching for a better life in Europe. I also had informal interactions with around 30 detention officers. Although I was not there on a research role, it seems that I did not take my research hat off. When an incident or a remark struck me, I wrote it down in a notebook I always had with me. If I could not do it then, I would try to reconstruct the event or what was said when back at home. My notes cannot be considered fieldnotes in the strict sense. Instead, they were my attempt to navigate the system I was a part of. In a more radical paremeter, by using these notes as research data, they honor a different understanding of immigration detention, one that brings diverse stories into the public arena to be acknowledged and witnessed. Relatedly, by including my experiences in the account I provide in this thesis, I see it as another way of resisting the harms of the system. As Dutta (2021) poetically reminds us through understanding the politics of alternative forms of ‘fieldnotes’, we enact 60