Practice submissions – are doctoral regulations and policies responding to the needs of creative practice?

ABSTRACT

Practice-based research is now widely accepted at doctoral level, and it is recognised that creative practice can be the mode, method, tool, object, subject and/or embodiment of research in the arts and humanities PhD. The growth of creative methods and arts-based methods also means that data is increasingly gathered through creative means in many social science and education doctorates. The doctoral contribution as thesis can therefore no longer be automatically assumed to be contained solely in a written text. This paper questions the extent to which research degree regulations and policies are reflecting and enabling the diversity of contemporary forms of knowledge articulation in practice-based research. Arising from my lived experience of supporting doctoral candidates to navigate regulations on the format and formatting of a submission, it draws on empirical research into research degree regulations at a number of universities in the United Kingdom, contextualised in relation to the literature. I reveal the assumptions and constraints embedded in regulatory practices and highlight ongoing concerns around the articulation and archiving of practice-based doctoral research.

KEYWORDS:

• PhD
• regulations
• creative practice
• practice-based research
• doctorates

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The terminology of such forms of creative research remains problematic, with various terms such as practice-led, practice-based, practice-as-research, design research, artistic research and practice research in use. It is not the place here to explain all these terms – they do have competing definitions and nuanced differences, see Smith and Dean 2009 or Taylor 2019. In this paper I will use practice-based research for consistency.

2. The University of London is a federated university with 17-member institutions, each of which has its own regulations.

3. Run by the British Library, EThOS provides an online national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions and free access to the full text of as many theses as possible. https://ethos.bl.uk/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sian Vaughan

Dr Sian Vaughan is Reader in Research Practice at Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University and a Site Director for Midlands4Cities, an Arts & Humanities Research Council funded Doctoral Training Partnership. She has published widely on doctoral education, supervision, artistic research practices, archives and public art.