Doctoral education is changing with increasing calls for interdisciplinarity (Rashid, 2021), greater provision for employability and impact (Picard and McCulloch, 2019) and doctoral writing reimagined (Badenhorst et al., 2021). In this special issue, we extend this discussion by focusing on changes accompanying the growth of creative practice in doctoral education.
Whilst creativity is arguably central to both research and doctoral education processes in all disciplines (Frick and Brodin, 2020), creative practice as part of the generation and articulation of knowledge produced through doctoral study now has several decades of history. Whether categorised as artistic research, practice-based, practice-led, practice-as-research or under the umbrella term practice research (Bulley and Sahin, 2021), it is acknowledged as a vital component of research in those disciplines perceived to be traditionally creative, such as performing arts, visual art, design and creative writing. Research within the doctoral education literature to date has focused on: the identity challenges and experiences of creative practitioners as doctoral candidates (Hockey, 2008); illustrating models and examples of practice research to argue for acceptance and equivalence (Vear et al., 2021); and how doctoral education practices such as supervision, research seminars and examination processes have required adaption to appropriately support practice research within creative disciplines (e.g. Wisker and Robinson, 2017). Yet to date limited literature exists on how creative practice as practice research might be influencing the changing doctoral landscape beyond creative disciplines.
In proposing this special issue, we intended to move beyond the emphasis on legitimisation, arguably common to the emergence of all new disciplines and research paradigms (Becher, 1989; Trowler et al., 2012). Instead, we aimed to consider the impact of creative forms of knowledge generation and articulation on doctoral education more broadly and in relation to policy, process and practice. This focus is prompted by the growing influence of what can be broadly termed “creative practice” found outside of disciplines that are traditionally recognised as creative. There has been the increasing recognition and adoption of creative methods and arts-based methods of gathering and presenting research data across a range of social science and humanities disciplines, accompanied by supporting methods handbooks and literature (e.g. Leavy, 2018). Arguably, what these research practices have in common – inflecting supervision, thesis formats, examination and more – is that the methods and artefacts of creative practice as evidence of knowledge generation push against deeply entrenched assumptions, epistemological hierarchies and often institutional structures for doctoral education.
Collectively, the papers in this special issue demonstrate and critique the influence of creative practice on doctoral education and expose continuing tensions around policy and processes. Bringing together the often-separate discourses on practice research and creative methods, the special issue explores the impact of the models and methods of creative practice beyond disciplines traditionally viewed as creative, identifying how doctoral education is responding to creative practice through institutional systems and structures. Our intentions were to identify what challenges remain, and importantly, how might the potential for further change in response to creative practice benefit a broader reconceptualisation of contemporary doctoral education?
Collective perspectives on creative practice
We are delighted that the seven papers in the special issue represent a variety of doctoral education contexts: from different geographic and disciplinary contexts; those in differing roles in doctoral provision; and engaging with diverse forms of creative practice. Three papers are written from a UK perspective (Riley, Curtis and Husband, Vaughan), two papers from a Canadian context (Kipp et al., 2025; Fitzpatrick et al., 2025), one from Australia (Couzens et al., 2025) and one from Aotearoa New Zealand (Hill and Perrot) which explicitly points to valuing and embracing indigenous methods and knowledge systems frequently absent from Global North discourses on the doctorate. The disciplinary contexts discussed include creative practice disciplines such as art and design (Riley, Hill and Perrot), film and media (Couzens et al., 2025), as well as education studies (Curtis and Husband, 2024; Fitzpatrick et al., 2025) and cultural studies (Couzens et al., 2025), and perspectives from those in from interdisciplinary research (Vaughan, 2025; Kipp et al., 2025), social practice (Kipp et al., 2025) and strategic communications (Couzens et al., 2025).
Further demonstrating the spread and relevance of considering creative practice in doctoral education, the papers focus on a range of stages of doctoral study and from different voices in doctoral provision. Collectively, the papers explore the implications and responses to creative practice in early-stage research methods courses (within the North American model of a doctorate; Fitzpatrick et al., 2025) and first year of study experiences (Kipp et al., 2025), ethical approval processes (Couzens et al., 2025), supervision practices (Hill and Perrot, 2025), thesis submission formats, assessment and examination (Riley; Curtis and Husband), as well as both inclusion and absence in broader institutional framings of doctoral provision (Vaughan, 2025). Our authors include experienced supervisors, those with experience of cross-disciplinary research degrees committees and Institutional Review Boards for ethics. Importantly, we also have the voices and insights from postgraduate researchers (PGRs, also known as doctoral candidates and higher degree researchers in different global contexts). One paper is co-written by a PGR and their supervisor (Curtis and Husband, 2024), and two papers are collaboratively produced by academics and PGRs – one in which the academics took the lead (Fitzpatrick et al., 2025) and one in which a group of PGRs have initiated and driven the study themselves (Kipp et al., 2025).
The format of the papers and research methods used in the individual studies that produced them demonstrate the range of ways in which engagement with creative practice in doctoral education occurs. The special issue includes papers embracing theoretical and empirical research where the articulation and structure of the paper adheres to the most part to academic conventions. Some papers deploy more reflective writing and creative writing drawing on autoethnographic and collective autoethnographic approaches. There are dialogue and script-based structures to papers, including one with the creative artefact itself having a voice, where the play is the thing that speaks. Insights are generated and arguments proposed from large archival data sets and institutional documentation, reflections on lived experience, analysis of reflective writing in diary entries, imagery produced through individual and group arts-based methods, written feedback from PGRs and creative artefacts and art works produced through practice research. A commonality across the papers is in authors sharing their experiences and research, their stories, with the aim of supporting others to engage with and better support creative practice in doctoral education.
Different viewpoints and experiences
Three of the papers point out the dichotomies, tensions and misunderstandings around creative practice based on assumptions about doctoral research provision emanating from other research paradigms. Riley (2024) makes a philosophically grounded argument for a new criterion of assessment for examiners and committees scrutinising practice-based doctorates in the visual arts. Taking an aesthetic cognitivist perspective, his paper demonstrates how the relationship between creative practice and research is imbricated in epistemological assumptions and points to university research cultures and processes being steeped in knowledge defined as exclusively propositional. In the context of cross-disciplinary institutions, he aims to counter this separation of propositional and non-propositional knowledge with a new criterion of the balance between perceptual and conceptual insights to enable further understanding and acceptance of practice research within a wider academic sphere. The paper by Couzens et al. (2025), aims to break down some of the oppositionality and misalignment around research ethics review and approval processes for creative practice research. Using dialogic enquiry, they bring into conversation the experiences of practice researchers in creative disciplines with those on Institutional Review Boards faced with applications different to those they normally encounter. Similarly to Riley, they note the dominant positivist paradigm; here, conceptualising research ethics with processes, procedures and language stemming from and privileging the medical sciences. Demonstrating that facilitating dialogue is crucial to establish necessary mutual trust to smooth the process, they argue for flexibility as well as the need for changes to practices of ethical approval on both sides. Their concluding argument on the importance of reframing ethics as integral to the design and progress of research rather than positioning it as a logistical hurdle to be overcome, whilst aimed at creative practice researchers, is relevant to all doctoral education.
Hill and Perrot’s paper adds to a growing body of pedagogical research and literature on supervising creative practice doctorates and arts-based modes of researching (e.g. Allpress et al, 2012; Hamilton and Carson, 2015; Borgen et al., 2024). They draw on examples from their own experience in the geo-cultural context of a university in Aotearoa New Zealand where, as the authors observe, there is growing but still relatively few numbers of practice research doctorates in the creative arts and thus fewer exemplars. They reveal how existing pedagogical approaches can be combined and tailored in the context of creative practice through the example of their own doctoral supervisory practice. Their reflective narratives expose tensions around confirmation of candidature and ethical approval processes experienced as privileging traditional research practices. They sensitively and respectfully draw on the indigenous model of Tuakana-Teina as offering a mutually beneficial and non-hierarchical alternative to the master-apprentice model for intercultural supervision and valuing different forms of knowledge.
Curtis and Husband explore these tensions around “tradition” that persist in research, particularly regarding the PhD thesis format and examination, where the need to align examiner expectations (Kiley, 2009) and regulatory requirements have additional nuances where creative practice is concerned (Vaughan, 2021). Coauthored by a PGR and their supervisor, the paper reflects on the responses to the submission of a play-text as a separate physical artefact deemed integral to the authenticity of the research. They note that unlike in performance disciplines where there is greater acceptance, challenges arose using this approach in relation to completing a PhD in Education. Their paper performs these tensions through a drama script, revealing both PGR and supervisor perspectives on the experience, and in which the creative practice has voice, with the play script itself a speaking character. Commenting on perceived slow incremental change in doctoral education, they point to a need for the crossover of experiences with other disciplines and the need to be “respectfully and academically bolshy” whilst “leaving a doorstop in place for those that follow”, noting the supervisory relationship are key to enabling creative practice to flourish and navigate the institution.
Resonating with this acknowledgment of the desire for experience to cross disciplines to better support creative practice in doctoral education beyond the arts, Vaughan’s paper proposes and examines the concept of such “creative contagion”. Describing how the growth and history of practice research in creative disciplines is concurrent with the proliferation of arts-based methods in other disciplines, her research reveals differences in the response of doctoral systems. She interrogates a national archive of data from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) for evidence of the spreading of tailored provision for creative practice in doctoral education, comparing samples in creative disciplines with those in education and engineering. Underpinned by concepts of meta-research (Oancea et al, 2024), she considers REF documentation as examples of political discourse, pointing to priorities (and normativities) within such institutional statements on doctoral provision, as well as the gaps and missing stories of creative practice.
The final two papers in the issue focus on the PGR experience and the use of arts-based methods in activities complementary to, but separate from, doctoral research projects, and through which enhanced understanding of doctoral experience (Hopwood, 2010) can inform provision. Fitzpatrick et al. (2025) focus on the example of a core advanced research methods course at start of the doctorate in Canada, in which they introduced journalling and small-scale creative activities to support reflection. With both PGRs and instructors keeping journals, the paper reports on a narrative analysis revealing the variety of responses to creative practice – including frustration and discomfort as well as enjoyment – theorised through engagement with literature on creativity and the emotional side of doctoral study. For Fitzgerald et al. (2025), the creative activities of collage, creative writing and drawing in the journals enhanced all participants’ understanding of the experience and emotions of starting on a doctoral programme in Education Studies and led to insights that enabled curriculum development.
Drawing from design thinking, the paper by Kipp et al. (2025), a group of ten PGR co-authors, frames journey mapping as a creative practice and tool for critically reflecting on the PGR experience to inform programme change. From within a Canadian PhD programme focused on social justice, their research takes the form of a collective autoethnography that examines activity taking place in the early years of doctoral study and during the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue for the benefits of the creative methods of drawing and annotating used in sense-making and collective reflection, as well as the sharing of vulnerabilities for doctoral community to nurture care and well-being. Whilst their findings echo concerns in the literature around the importance of doctoral community (Mantai, 2019; Nerad, 2012), they extend this to articulate the liberatory potential of creative practice as being generative in enabling resistance to counter the hegemonies and oppressions in higher education. The authors also note the realities of the emotional labour involved in such reflective activities. The insights revealed through their creative journey mapping activities have provided a catalyst for change in the ongoing development of their doctoral programme. For them, and we as guest editors would agree, creative practice and how we respond to it, enables the possibility to imagine how to do doctoral education differently.
Reflections, disruptions and provocations
As guest editors, it has been interesting for us to see how “creative practice” has been approached in different ways from different disciplines and paradigmatic perspectives, expanding more broadly to “creativity” and “creative thinking” in research and doctoral education. Our initial assumption that discussion and sharing models across disciplines was needed has been proven and one of the key contributions of this special issue is in the way it speaks across disciplines about creative practice in doctoral education. In straddling perspectives, we have engaged reviewers from both within creative disciplines and within the field of education for each paper through the process of peer review. Whilst our reviewers have been incredibly kind, constructive and sensitive in their approach (for which we are grateful), the different disciplinary expectations of papers have been fascinating and quite illuminative in themselves. It has been apparent that there is little familiarity across both sets of literature, and that what may appear innovative and/or problematic in arts-based methods is considered well-established in a practice research context, and vice versa. As the special issue demonstrates, more dialogue across disciplines is needed.
Creative practice is having some influence on changing broader systems and processes in doctoral education, although this process is slow and incremental. The papers in this special issue demonstrate that understanding of, and support for, creative practice in doctoral education is not the same across disciplines or geographically, and that regardless of whether one is working in a “traditionally” creative disciplinary context or not, tensions may still be experienced in navigating policy and institutional practices. Much of this comes from often implicit methodological, epistemological and articulatory assumptions that are enacted as hierarchies. Reflecting on the challenges and needs in supporting creative practice is one lens to bring such assumptions in doctoral education into focus, enabling their appropriateness to be reviewed and challenged. In the current socioeconomic climate, many practitioners, researchers and educators invariably are working in highly constrained ways under the prevailing conditions of neoliberalism. Somewhat unexpectedly, nearly all the papers in this special issue note the very real pressures of neoliberalism, pointing to the potential amplification of its effects in the context of navigating creative practice and the institution. These touch upon the persistence of auditability and performance of accountability within a culture of surveillance, managerialism, instrumentalism and consumerism. Not only do the papers highlight the pressures, complexities and contradictions of neoliberal ideologies, but many highlight creative practice as a disruption not just to academic norms and ideas about knowledge (Taylor, 2019) but as a challenge to pressures of neoliberalism in doctoral education and higher education more generally.
Supporting creative practice in doctoral education is about addressing concerns of equivalence and legitimacy through appropriate translations and flexibility in institutional processes and procedures. Crucially it also entails acceptance of difference – whether of different methods, formats or ways of knowing and doing – and enabling spaces for difference in doctoral education. To quote from bell Hooks (1995, p. 265), “beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world”. Such affirmation and enabling of difference within provision for doctoral education is urgently needed, not only to support creative practice, but more broadly to create spaces for PGRs and research with multiple ways of living in, and changing, the world. Creative practice remains a provocation to do doctoral education differently.
