When I teach creative research methods or creative academic writing to doctoral students, they often ask me this question. The short answer is: your doctoral research can be as creative as you like. The longer answer adds: as long as the support you need is in place.

Some students tell me they can’t use creative approaches, but this isn’t true these days – and that applies right across disciplines. Support for creative doctoral research comes from four main sources: supervisors, examiners, universities, and literature. It helps if you can decide at a very early stage that you want to take a creative approach, ideally before you choose your supervisors. However, many doctoral students don’t think about this option until they are some way into their doctoral studies.

If you can decide on your preferred approach before you choose your supervisors, you can deliberately select supervisors who will support you in doing creative doctoral research. They will also find you an external examiner who will be supportive. There are increasing numbers of academics who are open to creative work, so this is much easier than it used to be.

You can also check out the level of institutional support. If you think you might want to produce a creative thesis or dissertation, it’s worth finding out whether the university where you’re planning to register has an alternative formats policy. If it does, that should be a big help. If not, you might want to think again, or ask whether such a policy is under development. Alternatively, if you’re underway with your doctoral studies but at an early stage, and your institution doesn’t have an alternative formats policy, you could ask them to develop one. There are plenty of precedents available online.

If you are underway with your studies, and one or more of your supervisors is nervous about the prospect of a creative approach and/or a creative doctoral output, you need to make your case in the form of an academic argument. This doesn’t have to be very long – often a couple of pages is enough – but it should set out clearly what you plan to do, how, and why, with reference to the creative research methods literature. Helpful sources include:

My book on creative research methods

Dawn Mannay’s book on visual, narrative and creative research methods

The Journal of Creative Research Methods

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Creative Research Methods

The Handbook of Creative Data Analysis

The Creative Research Methods In Practice book series

Reimagining Doctoral Writing – an open access edited collection

Doing Rebellious Research In And Beyond The Academy – another edited collection

Five posts on this blog called ‘Getting Creative With Your Thesis Or Dissertation’ numbers one, two, three, four and five

There are also books on creative research methods in specific disciplines and fields, including human geography, economics, music, education, military studies, and critical event studies – maybe others too. Even if you’re not in any of these disciplines and fields, these books may be worth consulting, because methods are often transferable across disciplines.

When I did my own PhD, in the early 2000s, I wanted to be a lot more creative than I was allowed to be. In those days there were no resources I could draw on to make an argument that would convince my supervisors to change their minds. They were very good supervisors, and I enjoyed my PhD studies, but over 20 years ago doctoral students rarely used creative approaches. This is one reason I have invested so much time and energy since then in creating and sharing resources for doctoral students and other researchers. So, if you want to be creative with any element of your doctoral research, these days you don’t have to take ‘no’ for an answer. And for a short cut, you could always try saying “Helen Kara said I could.” You never know – it might work!

Other people have started calling me a professor. When I worked in South Africa last October, Professor Lynn Hendricks, who brought me over, referred to me as Prof Helen Kara. When I queried this, she told me firmly that as far as she’s concerned, I am a professor.

Then this year Professor Jackie Carter made a similar comment on LinkedIn.

So can I call myself a professor now?

On the one hand, I can call myself whatever I like. I could style myself Sovereign of Scholarship or Empress of Enquiry if I wanted to. My friend and colleague Janet Salmons calls herself a free-range scholar, and I wish I’d thought of that first! So in this sense, yes, I could call myself a professor.

On the other hand, the title of professor is given to people by other people in recognition of their professional accomplishments. The recipients are usually experts in their field. I was very uncomfortable with the idea when people began to call me an expert, but that was over 10 years ago and I’ve got used to it now. (Though I’m still questioning it as a concept, particularly the way it intersects with power.) Also, professors have usually made a significant contribution to their field. Well, OK, I’ve done that too. But, and this is the crucial part, professors are all academics, and I am not, and never have been, an academic.

Professorships are given to people by other people, but always in an institutional context. There are honorary professorships, but I’ve never been offered one of those (except for the time an invitation came from a person who hadn’t checked whether their institution agreed with the offer, which they didn’t, so it never actually happened).

I’m happy calling myself an independent researcher and scholar because that’s what I am. So I won’t be calling myself a professor. If an institution ever wants to award me an honorary professorship, I may rethink this, but given the current state of academia I don’t see that happening.

What might happen, though, as I’m in my 60s now, is that in a few years’ time I could award myself the title of ‘independent researcher emerita’. We’ll see!

In 2025, after 25 years as an independent researcher, I was awarded research funding for the first time. Not from the UK – I have written elsewhere about how independent researchers are not eligible for any UK government research funding, and how short-sighted I think that is – but from the Independent Social Research Foundation which is based in Europe. They gave me £7,100 to work with George Watts and Kate Fox towards a definition of neurodiversity-affirming space.

We are all neurodivergent ourselves, and we worked with neurodivergent people in an online and a face-to-face workshop. Of course we used creative methods: story stems, drawing, poems, mapping, collage plus a great deal of chat. Our participants were generous with their time and ideas. We also analysed creatively, combining thematic, poetic, and narrative analytic work. And we are disseminating creatively, through a zine which you can access here. Today I’m in Durham with George at the Neurodevelopment and Neurodiversity conference, where they said we could have a poster but we decided a zine would be better and fortunately the conference organisers were happy to give us the go-ahead. We have printed copies to give away and a QR code for people who want digital access.

Our findings are formulated as a working definition, reflecting both the scope of the project and the people we were able to include. With 20 participants, we achieved diversity across age, gender, and ethnicity, though we were not able to include non-speaking neurodivergent people — a meaningful gap that we want to name directly. I recently read Upward Bound by the non-speaking autistic writer Woody Brown, and it sharpened my thinking about whose experiences our definition may not yet capture. We offer this definition as a starting point, not a final word.  

Here’s our working definition:

• Neurodiversity-affirming spaces are physical and virtual environments which aim to enable neurodivergent people to function safely, comfortably and without judgment, with understanding and acceptance of their physical, emotional, and communication needs.
  
• Neurodiversity-affirming spaces are adaptive and responsive to the sensory and communication needs of the people in them, including non-speaking people, and to changes in those needs. 
  
• Neurodiversity-affirming spaces accord with the principles of the neurodiversity paradigm* (Walker 2021) which value the natural and creative diversity of different minds and ways of being. 

If you would like to download this, plus a note about the neurodiversity paradigm, you can do so here. The zine is available here, and the story I wrote from the narrative analysis (which wouldn’t fit into the zine) is here.

This is now for others to use and take forward. We hope it will prove useful.

We are looking for a volunteer to attend the International Creative Research Methods Conference online and help to manage and moderate the chat. In return for this work, we will provide a free ticket to the online conference.

We are specifically seeking an individual with prior experience of moderating and managing online conference chats or similar digital events. Confidence in managing discussions, responding to participants, liaising with the people coordinating the online event from the venue, and supporting smooth online delivery is essential. You will be working with a second volunteer, already recruited, who is very capable but not experienced.

There is a keynote at the start of each day, followed by two parallel streams; you will need to decide between you who will attend which sessions so that all are covered. The full programme can be found here. It is essential that you are available for both full days (Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th September 2026) to ensure complete coverage across all sessions.

If you would like to apply for this opportunity, please create a Word document confirming that you can work in the BST time zone and will be available for the entire conference. You should also outline your relevant experience moderating or managing online events and explain why we should select you (in no more than 200 words).

Please send your application to enquiries@creativeresearchmethods.com by midnight on Friday 10th July 2026. We look forward to hearing from you!

Like many, many others, I met Raul on Twitter some time around 2010. Social media was Raul’s natural habitat; it could have been made for him with his burning desire to communicate and demystify. Later we communicated via Facebook and Instagram, until I gave up almost all things Meta in 2019 (I’m reluctantly still on WhatsApp; no idea why everyone doesn’t move to Signal, it’s so similar to use and much less unethical). And we emailed. Not often, not at length, mostly to share resources. Raul was endlessly frustrated by difficulties in accessing academic materials, because of paywalls and because many publishers won’t ship books to Mexico. I was able to help him by emailing PDFs and occasionally sending books.

Raul’s big passion was justice, particularly around water, public policy, and governance. Those are not my areas of expertise or scholarship, but our interests coincided around methods and ethics. And here he has left us a marvellous legacy, in his voluminous blog and his published work. The strapline for his blog is “Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems” but he couldn’t resist also working to understand and solve all sorts of scholars’ and researchers’ problems with academic and research processes.

I tracked down his published work via Google Scholar where I was shocked to see how little his work has been cited. He was so visible that I was expecting to see tens of thousands of citations. In a beautiful ‘in memoriam’ post by Raul’s friend Jo VanEvery, she suggests that one of the best things we can do in his memory is to read and cite scholars from the majority world. I endorse Jo’s suggestion 100%, and would add that citing Raul’s own work should be part of this. He wrote about methods for the open access International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and about teaching in various book chapters and encyclopaedia entries. Here are his key methods texts, all open access:

2018: with Kate Parizeau, article on the opportunities and challenges of doing ethnography with vulnerable populations

2018: open access editorial showcasing six writing books to improve your qualitative methods prose

2019: open access editorial on why and how to write fieldnotes

I will be using and citing these works, and I feel ashamed that I have not already done so.

But for Raul it was never just about the work or the public persona. He brought his whole self to social media, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish. We don’t often speak of love in professional scholarly circles, but it seems to me that love underpinned all of Raul’s life and work. When I was looking through our email correspondence, I found a message he sent me in early April 2020, when my mother had just died from Covid. Raul and I knew each other; I feel confident in saying we liked and respected each other; but we never met and we were not close. And yet, at a time when all the world was shocked and afraid, he made the effort to send me this kind and loving message.

To me, these heartfelt words seem like the essence of Raul. I have seen similar posts elsewhere in recent days, which makes me realise that as well as his tangible legacy of written work, he has also left us a wonderful bequest of kindness.

There is an ongoing debate about kindness, and the lack of it, in scholarly life. I have written about this myself. Through the ways he chose to live, work, and communicate, Raul exemplified kindness, in academia and beyond. So I think another way we can honour his memory is to spread and amplify that kindness in our own lives, work, and communications with others. And maybe even, here and there, some love.

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded funding from the Arts Council to work with Kate Fox to offer (deep breath) creative writing opportunities for late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults. That was the official wording on the bid, and what it means in practice is that we’re offering online and in-person workshops for neurodivergent people to have a go at creative writing.

You get to decide whether you’re neurodivergent and, if so, whether your official or self-diagnosis was late. You must be 18 or over and be able to write in English. Other than that, you don’t need any specific writing experience or skills, just an interest in creative writing and a willingness to give it a try and have fun. We will be including prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, dialogue and even opportunities to incorporate drawing or images for those who wish. We are also likely to include neurodivergent forms including zuihitsu, language as stimming, the links between biodiversity and neurodiversity, neuroqueering forms, and generally exploring neurodivergent self-acceptance through creative writing and reading.

The in-person workshops are at Heath House in Uttoxeter on Tuesday 22 September, and at Cheese & Grain in Frome on Thursday 24 September, from 10-4.30. Our funding is enough to subsidise the workshops quite heavily, so the charges are between £30-£60 – you decide how much you can pay within that range.

The online workshops are on Zoom, on Sundays from 27 September to 1 November from 3-4.30 pm BST/GMT. Again, these are heavily subsidised, so the charges for all six workshops are between £30 and £95 – you decide how much you can pay within that range. We are only accepting applications to attend all six workshops; it is not possible to sign up for just one or two workshops.

In excellent news, there are two bursaries for each of the three workshop options. These bursaries only cover the cost of the workshop, so for an in-person workshop you would need to cover any other costs such as travel and accommodation.

Places on our workshops are limited; click here if you want to book.

(We’re also running a residential version at Lumb Bank, the Arvon Foundation’s house near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, but that one sold out before I got around to writing this.)

The funding isn’t only for the workshops. We are going to evaluate those thoroughly, then use our findings to produce a draft toolkit for writing facilitators who are, or may be, working with neurodivergent writers. We will pilot that toolkit with staff at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, Norfolk, and then finalise it and share.

I’m so excited about this project! It’s different from anything I’ve done before, yet it draws on a lot of my experiences and skills. My experiences and skills, and Kate’s, are complementary and I’m delighted to be working with her.

If you have any questions, you can either leave me a comment below or email ahappyplace.enquiries@gmail.com.

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious parcel. When I opened it, I found a book called Making Qualitative Research Happen: Getting The Best Out Of Your Qualitative Research Project, edited by Jess Weisser, Cathy Gibbons, and Daniel Turner. I know Daniel quite well, and Cathy a little, and I thought it very kind of them to send me a copy of their book. Until I scanned the contents pages, I had completely forgotten that I wrote a couple of its sections myself!

I wrote the sections on creative research methods and on collaboration, data analysis, and ethics. I’m in good company, too, as other contributors include Mónica Sánchez-Hernández on colonialism, coloniality and decolonising approaches in research, and academic extractivism and exploitation; Christina Silver on what’s occurring in the qual-AI space and why it matters; Kimberley Hirsh on when to use a priori coding; and Anuja Cabraal on using emojis for coding and analysis. But Jess, Cathy, and Daniel wrote most of this 373-page book, and that is a laudable achievement. They are all very experienced qualitative researchers, and experienced teachers of other qualitative researchers, and their wealth of experience and knowledge enriches every page.

The book is written in a friendly style and lightly referenced, and so is very readable. It is comprehensive, too, with sections on epistemology and meta issues, designing and planning research, gathering data, managing and handling data, analysing and transforming data, and writing and reporting findings and research. The structure and contents are well signposted, and there is a useful index, so it’s easy to dip in and out of to read the parts you need or which interest you most. And the chapter on qualitative research and AI brings the book bang up to date.

I was interested to read, on the QDAS website, that Christina Silver’s position on the use of generative AI in research is different from Daniel Turner’s. I wasn’t surprised, though, because I know Daniel to be open-minded and interested in viewpoints that are different from his own. I think this is exemplary book editing practice, because books where all contributors share the same views would soon become boring to read. Also, the book is very competitively priced, with the paperback plus eBook at £30 and the eBook alone at only £8.

But perhaps most importantly, this book acknowledges the challenges qualitative researchers may face as well as giving invaluable advice on the process of qualitative research. I wish I had had this book when I started my MSc in social research methods in 1999 – though some of the content would have read like science fiction back then!

Of course Making Qualitative Research Happen doesn’t include every single thing about qualitative research. That would be impossible because there is too much to cover and the field is always developing. However, the back cover describes it as ‘everything you need to get started with qualitative research’ and I think that is no exaggeration. This book is a very clear and useful companion for anyone who is new to, or would like to know more about, qualitative research in practice.

It is no secret that the university sector in the UK is experiencing a massive financial crisis. I guess this is why I’m getting new requests to work for universities for nothing. I wrote a post about this 11 years ago, after which the situation got a lot better for a while. I’m not suggesting my post caused that: there was a lot of chat about the issue on Twitter and Facebook, which were useful platforms in those days, and sympathetic academics helped to make the change. But now it’s happening again.

One recent request was from a Russell Group university which made a post-tax surplus of £35m in 2025. This was a lot lower than its 2024 surplus, and I do understand that businesses have to be careful with their money. But it is still THIRTY-FIVE MILLION POUNDS. My own most recent post-tax surplus is £14,545. So what makes it OK for that big and profitable business to ask me to contribute my expertise, which is based on 27 years of research experience and 15 years of scholarly experience, for free?

Of course it’s not actually a university asking me, it’s a person. I don’t blame individuals for trying to find good opportunities for their students, events, colleagues etc. But it is the university which would be paying me (or not, as the case may be). And people in universities need to remember that they represent an organisation which is often, despite its protestations, very wealthy.

If I am invited to work in a university, that means there is nobody on that university’s payroll who can do whatever it is I am being invited to do. The same, no doubt, applies to plumbers, roofers, landscapers, and so on. Do universities ask those professionals to work for nothing? Of course they don’t. So why is it somehow, apparently, once again OK to ask external knowledge professionals to work for nothing?

Fortunately there are still universities which are paying me to work for them. So far this year I have worked for Dublin City University, Nottingham Trent University, Bath Spa University, Ulster University (twice), and Queens University Belfast. I have had an enquiry about my availability for 2026-27 from Birmingham City University, where I have worked every year since 2016, and Brunel University invited me to work there but unfortunately that was on a date I couldn’t do.

Also, I get good feedback. Here are some examples from a creative academic writing workshop I ran at Ulster University in April (I have permission to share them):

Very useful for writers – but also just that the speaker was brilliant and inclusive.

This has been the most beneficial workshop / event I’ve been to since I started in September – it was as if Helen was able to climb inside my head and activate the ‘WRITE’ lever!

I’ve really struggled to get the creative & the academic writing as I couldn’t separate them – and yesterday really was a golden pathway that showed how I write IS good enough. I wrote more yesterday than I have from when I started my PhD in September.

Would appreciate taking points from Helen on how to make workshops more inclusive/accessible. She elegantly addresses them without disrupting the flow of the class nor does it feel like she has to do them out of training.

So it’s not just me saying my work has value.

I will and do work for nothing, but I reserve that for (a) user-led groups with no funding and (b) my own passion projects: the International Creative Research Methods Conference, the Journal of Creative Research Methods, and the Independent Research Ethics Committee.

It seems important to highlight this, not only for my own sake, but also for the sake of the increasing number of independent researchers and scholars. Expertise has value. This means we need to set sensible prices for our own expertise, and – where necessary – fight for our expertise to be valued equally by others.

I have written four previous posts on this topic, with different examples of creative theses and dissertations. Here are the first, second, third, and fourth of those posts.

Today I am showcasing: a thesis written in two different styles throughout; another which takes a multi-media approach; and a third which has been self-published as an open access comic. As a bonus, I will share a creative recording of a doctoral dissertation and its defence.

The thesis written in two different styles is by Anne Collis whose doctorate was in social policy and inclusion, with a focus on how to include people with learning disabilities in policy-making in Wales. Anne’s thesis is written in a reasonably conventional way, except that she also writes an ‘Alongsider Thesis’. This is a plain English version which is presented in the PDF of the thesis alongside the academic version. Close to the start of the Alongsider Thesis, Anne says:

“This thesis has two versions alongside each other.

• The right hand pages are written in Academic language.
• The left hand pages are written in Everyday language.

You can read just the Everyday pages to get an idea of what is in the thesis. You can start with the Everyday pages and then look across to get more details any time you want.

If you read Academic, you can read just the Academic pages. You can use the Everyday pages to make it quicker to read any parts of the thesis you aren’t so interested in. I hope some academics will get ideas by looking at the Everyday pages for ways they can try to share what they know.”

As Anne’s thesis is all about inclusivity, this creative approach makes perfect sense.

The multi-media thesis is by Elona Hoover whose doctorate was in Human Geography with a focus on urban ‘commoning projects’ in London and Paris. Elona is a musician; she plays the cello. Her thesis includes an experimentally written document, punctuated by five ‘samples’ and accompanied by a soundtrack. The written document uses a variety of fonts for different purposes: one for an ethnographic narrative, another for text taken directly from fieldnotes, a third for excerpts from documents, a fourth for quotes from interviews, and a fifth for notes for the reader, among others. The ‘samples’ are audio samples: sampling is a compositional technique that can be ironic, inclusive, and playful, among other things. And the soundtrack includes material from field recordings, Elona’s cello, people reading poems, and the sounds of turning on and off the microphone. In the PDF of the thesis, the soundtrack and samples are embedded audio files. There are invitations to the reader with each audio file, either to stop reading while listening or to listen while continuing to read. The author uses this multifaceted approach to reflect the complexity of communing with all its interpersonal, political, and conceptual interactions.

The thesis which was self-published as a comic is by Omar Bah, which is a pseudonym. The author is an African anthropologist who studied international development with a focus on expatriate aid workers who are known in some African languages as Mzungus. Omar’s PhD ‘tells stories of Mzungus and goals that were never reached’ and apparently no academic journal agreed to publish any part of it (Omar, if you’re reading this, please try the new Journal of Creative Research Methods). So Omar decided to self-publish his thesis – as an online comic, in two parts: first and second. It is a great read: insightful, uncomfortable, educational, funny, and worth the investment of time.

Vanessa Santos did a PhD in tourism with a focus on sustainability. She produced a video called ‘My Doctoral Viva’ which presents her doctoral dissertation through autoethnotheatre. In the associated text she describes her research as advocating “for context-sensitive, adaptive, experimental policymaking that balances economic growth with social sustainability, emphasizing a human-centered approach to tourism development”. The video is compelling to watch, and I’m delighted that Vanessa is coming to this year’s International Creative Research Methods Conference to present and discuss her work.