Abstract :
Within the United Kingdom higher education
system there has been a recent growth in practice-
based research degrees in art and design.
This constitutes a relatively recent innovatory
step in doctoral education, with students now
able to submit for examination a written thesis
combined with practical work in over forty academic
departments. It also constitutes an
intellectual innovation in terms of attempting to
combine the creative impulse with traditional
research criteria such as the need for systematic
analysis, documentation, theorisation and so on.
To-date little has been written about research
students adaptation to such practice-based
research degrees, and so, in order to chart the
experiences of such students, qualitative interviews
were undertaken with 50 research
students at various UK universities. This paper
based on those interviews examines one dimension
of how students adapt to this kind of study,
focusing on their conceptions of identity.
