Postscript

This postscript offers both a celebration of the achievements of the Productive Margins research programme and an attempt to set it in the broader context of contemporary political possibilities — and constraints. Its particular focus is on attempts to transform universities into instruments of engagement and connectedness — to turn them inside out. This is an attempt to take the ‘productive’ emphasis of the programme seriously, and to ask how far, or in what ways, the engagement of ‘communities at the margins’ has the potential to transform university hierarchies of knowledge and power. In addressing this question, the programme raises a number of issues that, if pursued in future work, have a transformative potential. The chapter also considers further unresolved questions and their potential limits on the impact of transformative agendas.