Making Creative Practice Research Visible: From Legitimacy to Infrastructure

I recently wrote an article for Wonkhe titled Making creative practice research visible. In it, I reflect on how creative practice research has moved from the margins of UK higher education into formal recognition through the Research Excellence Framework — and why that achievement now raises a new, more pressing challenge.

You can read the full article here.

The article is not a defence of creative practice research. That argument has largely been won. Instead, it asks what happens next. While creative practice is now recognised within REF structures, the knowledge it generates remains difficult to find, share, and reuse beyond individual institutions. Much of it is locked inside local repositories, bespoke formats, or one-off submission systems that don’t connect to each other.

What I argue in the piece is that we’ve reached a point where recognition is no longer enough. If creative practice research is to function as research — rather than simply as assessment evidence — it needs infrastructure. That means shared standards, interoperable systems, persistent identifiers, and national coordination that allow practice-based knowledge to circulate, be discovered, and contribute to wider research and policy conversations.

Writing the Wonkhe article was an attempt to shift the conversation away from legitimacy and towards visibility, circulation, and sustainability. The question is no longer whether creative practice research “counts”, but whether the systems around it allow that research to do meaningful work beyond the moment of evaluation.

This blog is a space to extend that thinking: to reflect on how research becomes visible, how infrastructure shapes value, and how universities might better support the long-term life of creative knowledge.