The purposes of this collection has been to use the reflective analyses of the contributors in order to explore the ways in which embedded research has been conceptualized, theorized, realized and problematized in different research settings. This is not to make a claim that such accounts are exhaustive of the types of experiences that doctoral students who find themselves in embedded research arrangements will encounter; rather the collection has been put together to illustrate some of the dominant themes apparent in embedded research arrangements experienced by ourselves and our doctoral colleagues. Our interest in embedded research was borne from a shared realization that a number of studentships at the University of Manchester Schools of Social Science and Education, were developed in collaboration with external organizations. In such arrangements doctoral students were appointed to undertake research projects that would both form the basis for an accredited thesis as well as contribute to the organization, whether through evaluation of existing policies and practices, or collaborative agenda setting. Our collective interest in this approach to doctoral research developed over time, as we spent more time delving into the methodology text books in our first year, searching for answers to the conceptual and practical questions we had regarding the embedded aspect of our research projects. We were neither fully in nor out of the organizations we were researching, rather, as Gunter and Thomson conceptualize (2011) and Harriet Rowley deploys, we were ‘liquid researchers’ moving fluidly in and between different organizations with different roles and purposes. It was the ‘realpolitik’ of undertaking research in such a way that bought us together as a community, looking to support each other through the vagaries of conducting research in an organization that we were simultaneously part of and from (Helen Gunter, in this collection). As such this collection has covered a range of positions experienced by embedded researchers, in the search for ‘relevant knowledge’ at a time of a rapid modernizing reform project in the public sector. This concluding article considers the communal themes predicated in each of the articles, and in doing so considers the challenges and potential that such themes offer to understanding embedded research as a viable and significant pathway for developing relationships between academia and public and third sector organizations. In the first instance the article considers three main themes identifiable in these articles: those of funding and impact, ethics and organizational change.