Some ideas can only be understood by leaving the desk. Expeditions is the record of that — the trips taken not for leisure but for evidence: the site visit, the interview in a language you’re only half-fluent in, the data collected standing in the rain because the instrument couldn’t wait for better weather. This is where the mess of real fieldwork gets written down before it’s sanded into a tidy report somewhere else — the wrong turns, the local who explained more in five minutes than the literature did in five papers, the moment a hypothesis quietly died on contact with reality. If you’ve ever come back from a trip with more questions than you left with, you already know the feeling this section is built around.