The Future of Practice Research Symposium

The Future of Practice Research Symposium took place at Manchester Metropolitan University on 9^th June 2025. Welcoming around 70 delegates from across the UK, the event was designed to act as national summit on issues for practice research in arts and humanities, across the Higher Education research sector.

Due to the way practice is produced and the diversity of its forms, practice research can be more challenging to present than other more traditional text-based outputs such as journal articles, collections or monographs. Recent AHRC-funded sector-wide scoping projects PR-Voices and SPARKLE have confirmed previous work and recommendations in this area from PRAG-UK, concluding that Practice Research continues to face significant challenges in terms of its identification, discoverability, visibility and parity with ‘standard’ outputs. Institutions currently respond individually to the requirement for assessment of Practice Research within assessment exercises such as REF, and the imperative of Open Access principles for the sharing of Practice Research. No standard repository system or principles of universal identification or systematic interoperability exists as yet. As such, this remains a new and developing infrastructure challenge for the entire HE sector.

In addition, staff recruited into academic contexts from practitioner backgrounds need support to be able to collate, organise and present high quality research in ways that align with the sector’s understanding of what constitutes high-quality research.

Practice Research has never been more important to the culture of our sector. With recent long awaited strategic shifts directed at recognising more diverse types of output from more diverse sorts of people, the necessity for appropriately sharing, assessing and valuing practice in all its forms, is essential and urgent.

As Open Research, Open Methods  and FAIR principles become our standard practices across every field, the lessons learned and knowledge gained from arts practice - capture and dissemination of research via portfolios of iterative work; co-producing work across teams of academics, practitioners and technical staff; placing value on exploration, emergence and the potential for failure – are now the pressing concerns for everyone that is engaged with ‘new knowledge, effectively shared’.

 For these reasons we could say that ‘The Future of Practice Research’ is, in fact, ‘The Future of Research’.

The event presented three talks:

• REF and Disciplinary challenges. Speaker: Rebecca Emmett (REF panel D representative from Research England)

• Charting the state of the art and where it could/should go: A co-design approach to developing research infrastructure to enable ‘FAIR’ PR. Speaker: Jenny Evans (Research Environment and Scholarly Communications Lead · University of Westminster. PI on PRVoices)

• Capturing the ephemeral: what do Practice Researchers want and need? New horizons and the future of sharing practice. Speaker: Prof Nick Fells (Professor of Sonic Practice, University of Glasgow. PRAG-UK Chair)

These were followed by a lively Q&A with the assembled audience.

A full-length video of these proceedings is available via The Future of Practice Research website.

Adding to the experience of the symposium discussions, the event also featured real practice research courtesy of Manchester Met graduating Masters students in MA/MFA Performance and MA Fine Art. Details of the students who presented work are also available on the website.

The symposium went on to host an afternoon workshop, welcoming the views of delegates to feed into a forthcoming briefing paper, which will be launched at a further event in September 2025. You can sign up to receive updates via the Manchester Met Practice Research Team at AHPRS@mmu.ac.uk

This event was supported by Research Culture development funding from Research England. 

Victoria Barragán – Practice Research Support Manager, Manchester Met 

Helen Darby - Research Impact Manager, Manchester Met

Photography by David Oates