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

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 (Taylor, 2018; Vaughan 2020). 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 (Kara 2015, Leavy 2018). 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