Developing a Practice Research Portfolio: Octopuses & Other Sea Creatures
I was invited to take part in the development of the Practice Research Portfolio (PRP) template while I was employed at Southampton Solent University, at a point when the institution was beginning to think seriously about how it would evidence creative practice research for REF 2029.
The problem was a familiar one. The university had a significant amount of high-quality creative practice taking place — often externally funded, frequently collaborative, and publicly visible — but no consistent mechanism for capturing how that work functioned as research. What was needed was not simply guidance for REF submission, but a developmental tool that could help staff articulate their practice as a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared.
At the time, I was operating in a dual capacity. Alongside being a creative practice researcher delivering large Arts Council–funded projects, I was also Deputy Dean for Film & Media with responsibility for research and knowledge exchange. That positioning meant I was involved both strategically and practically: thinking about institutional needs, while also being exposed to the realities of documenting complex, multi-component creative work.
The initial phase of the project involved looking outward. A small group of us reviewed publicly available creative practice submissions from REF 2021, paying close attention to what worked, what travelled clearly across disciplinary boundaries, and where submissions struggled to make research processes legible. From that analysis, a draft PRP template was developed, structured around REF’s core definition of research, but intended to be usable well before any formal submission point.
Crucially, the template was not left as a theoretical artefact. Two of us were invited to use it in anger, drafting full practice research submissions based on our own work. In my case, that meant working through Octopuses & Other Sea Creatures as a test case — not because it was exemplary, but because it was genuinely complex, multi-year, and multi-component.
What followed was an iterative process. Drafts were internally peer reviewed, revised, and then reviewed again by the university’s REF consultant. The version that now exists is effectively a third or fourth iteration. It could undoubtedly be refined further, but at some point it became clear that the document had value as it was: not as a finished solution, but as a stabilised moment in an evolving process.
At that point, I made a deliberate decision to park it.
The portfolio now published on Zenodo stands as two things at once. First, it is a documentation of a specific creative practice research project, framed using a template designed for REF-facing contexts. Second, it is a trace of a developmental process — showing how a PRP might be constructed, tested, peer reviewed, and iterated within an institution.
Publishing it openly felt important. Not because it resolves the challenges of creative practice research submission, but because it makes one attempt visible. On a meta level, this aligns with my ongoing interest in how creative practice research is recognised, narrated, and evaluated — and how much of that work happens before any formal assessment exercise begins.
The Zenodo record is available here:
Hanney, R. (2022). Octopuses & Other Sea Creatures: Creative practice research submission. Southampton Solent University. Zenodo DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18084274.
I’m sharing it in the spirit in which it was produced: as a working document, a provocation, and a resource others might adapt, argue with, or improve upon.