The practice-based PhD — a doctorate in which creative practice constitutes a significant part of the research contribution rather than merely providing the subject matter for a conventional written thesis — was, twenty-five years ago, a marginal and contested category within European higher education. Today, it is an established, if still debated, fixture across the art schools, architecture faculties and music conservatories of the continent. The trajectory from experimental programme to institutional mainstream tells a story about how knowledge is validated, what academic institutions are willing to recognise as research, and why the boundary between making and knowing remains a site of productive friction.
The Origins: Kent and the Early Pioneers
The University of Kent's PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, established in the late 1990s, is often cited as one of the first formal practice-based doctoral programmes in Europe, but the idea had been circulating earlier. The Bergen National Academy of the Arts in Norway, the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and the University of the Arts in Helsinki all developed early models in parallel, each shaped by distinct national research assessment frameworks and disciplinary traditions. What united them was a shared conviction that the knowledge embedded in artistic practice — in the decisions made while painting, composing, designing or performing — could be surfaced, examined and defended as a contribution to understanding in the same way that propositional knowledge derived from traditional academic methods could be.
The Bologna Process and the Standardisation of Structure
The Bologna Process, which harmonised degree structures across European higher education from the early 2000s onward, played an indirect but important role in the institutionalisation of the practice-based PhD. By establishing a three-cycle system of bachelor-master-doctoral levels and requiring that third-cycle programmes demonstrate clear learning outcomes, assessment criteria and quality assurance mechanisms, Bologna forced art schools that had previously offered more informally structured doctoral experiences to formalise their offerings. The result was a wave of new practice-based doctoral programmes across Europe between approximately 2005 and 2015, as art institutions that had previously limited their highest qualification to the master's level were prompted to develop PhD programmes that would keep them competitive in the emerging European Higher Education Area.
The Examination Problem: How Do You Assess a Painting?
The most persistently difficult question raised by the practice-based PhD is the question of assessment. A conventional PhD thesis can be examined by subject specialists who read the text, evaluate its argument, assess its contribution to existing knowledge and conduct a viva voce examination. A practice-based PhD submission typically consists of a body of creative work — an exhibition, a film, a composition, a design prototype — accompanied by a written component that contextualises and reflects on the practice. How the examiners weigh these two components, what criteria they use to judge the quality of the creative work as research, and how much weight the written component carries relative to the practice component, are questions that have produced a substantial literature of their own and remain differently resolved across different institutions and national systems.
The publication of the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research in 2020, endorsed by more than forty European art universities and research institutions, represented an attempt to establish shared principles for the recognition and evaluation of artistic research at doctoral level. The declaration affirmed that artistic research produces knowledge through creative practice and that this knowledge is, in principle, assessable — but it stopped short of prescribing specific assessment methods, leaving each institution to develop its own protocols within the declaration's broadly stated framework.
The Nordic Contribution
The Nordic countries have been disproportionately influential in the development of the practice-based PhD relative to the size of their populations and higher education systems. Norway's Artistic Research Programme, administered by the Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, provides dedicated funding for practice-based doctoral positions at Norwegian art institutions and has been a model for similar initiatives elsewhere in Scandinavia. The Norwegian Academy of Music, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the University of Bergen have all produced significant practice-based doctoral work that has shaped international discussion of the methodology and epistemology of artistic research.
The Nordic contribution has been particularly influential in developing the reflective element of practice-based research — the written component that accompanies and contextualises the creative work. Norwegian and Swedish doctoral programmes have tended to place more emphasis on structured reflection as an integral part of the research process than comparable programmes in the United Kingdom, which have sometimes treated the written component as a supporting document rather than a substantive contribution. The difference is one of emphasis rather than principle, but it has produced a distinctive Nordic tradition within the broader European development of the practice-based doctorate.
Current Challenges and Future Directions
The practice-based PhD now faces challenges that reflect its success rather than its marginality. As doctoral education has expanded across Europe, funding pressure on practice-based positions has increased; dedicated artistic research funding is still a fraction of the funding available for conventional scientific and humanities doctoral research. Employability outcomes for practice-based PhD graduates remain poorly tracked, making it difficult to make the case for further expansion. And as the generation of artist-researchers who pioneered the practice-based doctorate begins to retire from academic positions, questions about how their expertise in supervising and examining this form of research is transmitted to a younger generation of academics are becoming urgent.
None of these challenges threatens the established position of the practice-based PhD in the European higher education landscape. The question is no longer whether creative practice can constitute research — it is how institutions can sustain and develop the conditions under which it does so most productively. That is a question the field will spend the next decade answering through the work of the doctoral candidates themselves.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.