“What does visibility conceal?” Marilyn Strathern posed this question in a piece for British Educational Research Journal over twenty-five years ago. Strathern’s earlier research in Papua New Guinea on gift exchange informed her exploration of “the tyranny of transparency” engendered by the integration of neoliberal audit culture into the conduct of research and teaching in British higher education. Another anthropologist suggested that I take a look at Strathern’s piece to help me think about a problem for observations in educational policy research that I encountered this fall: what happens if you are invited by one person to join a business meeting of a set of policymakers, but this invitation is overruled by someone else? During field research in Belgium and France in 2025, I was disinvited from not one, but two meetings of European bodies concerned with transnational cooperation on educational policy.…