Lisbeth Frølunde

Frølunde's (Frolunde's) teaching and research areas are visual communication, arts-based research (the intersection of the arts and qualitative research methods), narrative inquiry and design in organizations. She is interested in learning and communication processes between people, texts and technologies. A central theme is how the sensory experience of making meaning (or representation) emerges through verbal and non-verbal forms of "making" expression. She is inter-disciplinary with practical experience in the design and media industry, organizational dialogic communication, arts therapy and visual arts/illustration.

Research

Her current research (2017) is arts-based research using drawing and collage, literary and autoethnographic methods. The focus is on memory work with photos and poetic representation inspired by tragicomic graphic novels with family “memoirs”, such as Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006). She reflects on suicide in her family and immigration experiences, juxtaposed with related historical events, in particular re. the United Nations. Secondarily, she continues to research media production, esp. regarding how academics communicate knowledge in academic videos and use digital media to promote their research to audiences outside academia. Thirdly, she applies dialogic approaches to facilitation in a collaborative project with focus on how visual methods and storytelling can scaffold robust organizational change. Please see publications.

Frolunde's research topics include controversial themes such as death, war, memory, difference, cheating online, therefore, entail reflexivity and discussion about ethics and privacy. Preferred research methods are visual, mediated discourse analysis of multimodal texts and group interaction processes, reflexive arts-based methodologies, as well as auto-ethnographic and online ethnographic approaches.

She explores how the arts, especially creative writing and visuals, can support processes of change from child to adult and old age. She studies how basic human abilities to communicate involve many complex abilities (to play, to design, to develop literacy, to empathize, to reflect), which can be seen as grounded in embodied practices of making and listening to stories.

Her research has a critical and arts-based approach to creating meaning, whether through images, oral storytelling, creative writing or other modes of meaning. For example, her research questions focus on how making stories with visual methods unfolds in collaboration with others (such as how a group makes LEGO models to brainstorm ideas). She has done fieldwork in various settings: high schools, universities, prisons, after school arts programs, and work places.

A particular interest is the rise of online digital technologies for making visuals and video production as well as the dissemination of visuals, such as via Instagram, twitter, YouTube and TED Talks. The many kinds of audiovisual stories shared in our current online ”folk culture” incur changes in the media ecology. The Internet may be a new printing press, but the transformations in media production and distribution raise many questions, including: if and how communicative genres are transforming, what are the implications of social media in particular for authorship, ownership, and distribution of multimedia texts by organizations and individuals? 

Frølunde's inspirations include the arts as experiential learning (Dewey), and critical, existential and dialogic approaches to literature, narrative inquiry and visual art, including British Cultural Studies. Her research explores a range of contexts for collaborative writing, drawing, reading, making audiovisual texts (such as podcasts, video and film), and how difference impacts on collaboration. She is engaged in arts-based research and its development in terms of criteria, especially aesthetic issues in relation to empowerment, creative potential, impact on readers/viewers.

Teaching

She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses and workshops in Communication Studies, contributing with humanistic perspectives on the use of digital technologies and imagery (such as data visualization) and supervises group projects. Courses include: Narrativity - Theory, Method and Practice, Communication Theories, Knowledge Communication and Dialogic Communication. Workshops include: Digital Media, Storytelling: Animation, offering visual methods for exploring, analyzing, reflecting, and communicating research-based knowledge.

Supervision spans Communication Studies and in HumTek (Humanities and Technologies foundation program). A sample of the students' project topics are: cross-cultural communication related to a refugee art exhibit, creativity discourses in the design sector, young people’s use of apps to prevent food waste, the failures of anti-smoking campaigns, seasonal promotional strategy of music festival, critical approaches to international aid on twitter, audience reception of hybrid documentary genres on war, dialogic approaches to representing mental illness, ethical issues regarding visual elicitation as interview method.

Funding

Funding for Frølunde’s post.doc. research (2009-11) was from two sources: Nordic Innovation, and KINO (a strategic research grant under the Danish Research Council), both with focus on innovation, entrepreneurship and new digital media production practices.
Other funded research work are grant from Linneaus University, Sweden (2009) on digital storytelling. She was the sole Danish research funded by the Norwegian Media Council as part of the Scandinavian project Making a Filmmaker (2008-09) on how young Scandinavian filmmakers learn about filmmaking.

Her PhD (2004-09) was funded in part by KINO under the research project DREAM (Danish Research on Education and Advanced Media) led by Prof. Kirsten Drotner. She received an additional grant from the Ministry of Education to support the collaborative production of educational materials on animation filmmaking with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.

PhD studies

Her PhD is from the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, 2009. Animated Symbols, her doctoral thesis, concerns how young people design animated films and the notion of a critical, multimodal design literacy. Her PhD stay abroad was at University of California Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Glynda Hull.

Background

Frølunde’s background combines research and practical experience in visual communication, visual art, design, computer human interaction, clinical art therapy and education.

She earned an MA from Lesley College Graduate School, Cambridge, Mass., and a BFA from Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. She has lived in Denmark since 1991.

Her work experience includes as Concept Developer for the LEGO Group in Billund and London (1997-2001), products included Mindstorm robots, the Friends girl-oriented product line, Creator 3D worlds, Bionicle, and film-editing LEGO software. She was a free-lancer in the publishing, IT and game industry as usability consultant, multi-media designer, and game illustrator back in the 80's when Boston was a hub for game design.

She was art teacher and project leader for the Danish Red Cross (1992-95), co-led a newspaper and facilitated arts and writing workshops for asylum seekers. She worked as an art therapist at museums and public psychiatric hospitals (including day hospitals under Harvard Medical School) in Cambridge, Mass., USA, (1985-90).

Frølunde has previously taught and supervised at several universities. She taught communication design at the IT University in Copenhagen (2001-02), taught expressive art therapies on the graduate level (in a Danish program under the European Graduate School, Switzerland, 1991-96), and at Lesley College Graduate School, USA, (1985-88). She was research assistant at Learning Lab Denmark, the Danish School of Education, collaborating closely with Prof. Mitch Resnick from MIT Media Lab, USA, on bringing Computer Clubhouses to Denmark (2001-04).