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 health care ethics. She is interested in learning and communication processes between people, texts and technologies. A central curiousity is about the creative processes in various perspectives; in communication studies, the arts, psychology, and qualitative, critical humanistic research. She draws on inter-disciplinary practical experience in the design and media industry, in psychiatry (doing intermodal arts therapy: visual art, dance, video, drama, music), and as arts coordinator for NGOs, such as the Danish Red Cross.

Research

Her current research (2017-) is in graphic medicine and arts-based research using drawing and collage, literary and autoethnographic methods. This includes developing stories and drawings for graphic novels on topics such as Parkinson's disease and suicide in her family and immigration experiences, juxtaposed with historical events and the role of the United Nations. Her creative process involves doing memory work with photos and poetic representation inspired by tragicomic graphic novels with family “memoirs”, such as by  Roz Chast, Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry. She has participated in the 2018 course taught by artist Halfdan Pisket on making comics under "Skolen for Tegneseriekunst" at Gladiator publishers.

Her recent projects continue her studies of media production and dissemination, esp. regarding how academics communicate knowledge in academic videos and use digital media to tell about their research to audiences outside academia. She also writes about dialogic and arts-based approaches to facilitation in collaborative projects using narrative and visual methods, such as creative writing, making collage, drawing comics and storytelling. Please see publications.

Frolunde's research topics include controversial topics such as suicide, war refugees, family memories, mourning, differences in collaboration, online identities, and the voice of marginalized groups, such as patients. These research topics entail reflexivity about inclusion/exclusion, representation in regard to voice, and the ethics of privacy on sensitive topics.

A key motivation is the potential for social change through the arts - the personal voice as having the power to change. She studies how basic human abilities to communicate involve many complex abilities (to play, to design, to develop literacy, to empathize, to reflect), grounded in embodied practices of making and telling stories.

Her research has a critical and arts-based approach to creating meaning, whether through filmaking, oral storytelling, or other modes of meaning, and the rise of online digital technologies. For instance, video production and dissemination has changed with adoption of platforms such as 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 hybrid texts (such as graphic novels, animation shorts, games, video and film), and how difference impacts on collaboration. She is engaged in arts-based research and its development, 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: Narrative and Visual Communication, Introduction to Communication Theories, Knowledge Communication and Digital Dialogic Communication. Workshops include: Digital Media: Video, Storytelling: Animation.

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 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 University 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).