Back in February, Rachel Pain of Durham University presented a Keynote Lecture as part of a series organised by the Creating Publics project in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) at the OU, on the theme of ‘Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together?’. Her talk addressed the ambivalence of the impact agenda, as opening up some possibilities for people, for example, working in PAR traditions of social science. You can now listen to the lecture here, which also includes some bumbling comments from me as a ‘respondent’.