Rethinking Peer Review for Creative Practice Research

There’s a quiet tension at the heart of creative practice research that I’ve been circling for some time.

Reposted from my LinkedIn articles, first published March 21, 2026

On the one hand, we’ve made significant progress in establishing that creative work can constitute research. That argument—once contested—is now broadly accepted across many disciplines. On the other hand, the systems that surround research, particularly peer review, still operate according to assumptions that don’t quite hold for much of what we do.

Peer review, as it currently functions, presumes a certain kind of object. Something stable. Something that contains its argument. Something that can be revised in response to critique. This works well for written scholarship, and to some extent for screen-based work, where a digital artefact can be revisited, shared, and discussed. But much creative practice doesn’t behave like this.

If your work unfolds through performance, installation, participation, or site-responsive processes, then the research isn’t located in a single outcome. It emerges through the process itself—through material decisions, temporal unfolding, encounters with participants, and the reflections that follow. By the time the work is “finished”, much of what constitutes its research contribution has already passed, dispersed across moments that cannot be easily reassembled. And yet, we continue to think about reviewing it as if it were contained within a fixed artefact.

The problem here isn’t that the work is lacking. It’s that we are asking it to perform a function it was never designed to fulfil. Creative practice research often produces knowledge that is implicit, embodied, and emergent. It does not always declare itself in propositional form, and it rarely sits neatly inside the work itself. What becomes necessary, then, is articulation.

Not as an explanatory layer added afterwards, and not as a justification for the work, but as a continuation of the research process itself. The article develops this idea in more detail, arguing that writing, documentation, and reflection are not supplementary to practice—they are part of how the research becomes legible at all.

From this perspective, peer review begins to look slightly different. Rather than treating it as a moment of judgement at the end of a project, we might understand it as part of an ongoing process of articulation. A space in which the research is clarified, extended, and sometimes even discovered more fully through dialogue. This doesn’t mean abandoning rigour. If anything, it demands a different kind of rigour—one that is attentive to process, to context, and to the ways in which knowledge is distributed across practice.

The article explores this through a small pilot workflow, in which the research statement becomes the primary site of review and revision, while the creative work itself remains unchanged. What emerges is not simply a reviewed output, but a more transparent and traceable account of how the research is being articulated, challenged, and developed.

I’m not presenting this as a finished solution. It’s better understood as a proposition—one attempt to think through how peer review might be reconfigured so that it is more closely aligned with the epistemic realities of creative practice research.

If this is something you’re grappling with in your own work, or in the contexts you support, I’d be really interested to hear how others are approaching it.

Read the full article

Hanney, R. (2026). Articulation as Continuation: Rethinking Peer Review for Non-Screen-Based Creative Practice Research. International Journal of Creative Media Research, 13. https://ijcmr.online/2/article/view/163