Frølunde's (Frolunde's) teaching and research areas are visual communication, arts-based research (the intersection of the arts and qualitative research methods), dialogic theory, social semiotics and narrative inquiry. Frolunde is engaged in arts-based research and its development, especially aesthetic issues in relation to health, empowerment and collaboration with various groups in society.

She is currently doing research on the arts and health in the "Dancing with Parkinson’s" project, which is a collaboration between Roskilde University, the Danish Parkinson's Association and Tivoli Ballet School, and is funded with a grant from the Velux Foundation, HUMPraxis Programme (January 2019-December 2021). Please read more about "Dancing with Parkinson’s"

Research

Her research is in the intersection of the arts and health communication and participatory and embodied approaches within arts-based research. Her current research project with colleagues has focus on dance experience and collaboration. She is interested in the potentials and challenges of telling personal stories about illness, especially through graphic novels (comics) in relation to collaboration and health care ethics. The interest in storytelling includes writing autofictional stories and drawing short "comics" or graphic novels, including on Parkinson's disease in the family and immigration experiences. The personal is seen in light of cultural, historical and political contexts. She applies narrative and visual methods, such as memory work with photos and poetic representation inspired by artist Lynda Barry, among others. She has participated in the 2018 course taught by artist Halfdan Pisket on making comics under "Skolen for Tegneseriekunst" at Gladiator publishers.

Research topics also include refugee and immigration experience, the representation of ability/disability and aging, mediation of memories, mourning, humour and everyday life. She has studied online practices and identities, e.g. avatars, using critical cultural perspectives on social media, with focus on cheating, polarization and echo chambers. Another research topic is visual communication applied to how academics communicate knowledge, such as in academic videos about their research to audiences outside academia, espcially pertinent in relation to "fake news". These topics relate to dialogic and narrative concepts about inclusion/exclusion, difference in collaboration, ethics and voice. 

A key research motivation is to explore the power dynamics of communication in relation to social change through media and the arts. 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, expressive practices. The making of images and telling of stories is seen as positioned in various multimodal forms, genres, and media technologies.

Her research has a critical and arts-based approach to creating meaning across media with a historical perspective on media ecology. 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?

Teaching

She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Communication Studies theory with special focus on visual, narrative and multimodal communication and the rise of digital technologies, including data visualization. Courses include: PhD course on Autoethnographic Methods and graduate level courses Narrative and Visual Communication, and Digital Dialogic Communication. She has also taught courses on the Bachelor level: Introduction to Communication Theories, Knowledge Communication and the workshops Digital Media: Video, and Storytelling: Animation.

She supervises group projects for Danish and international students on the graduate level. A sample of the students' project topics are: songwriting and identity, cross-cultural communication related to a refugee art exhibit, creativity discourses in the design sector, food waste, the failures of anti-smoking campaigns, critical approaches to international aid on twitter, audience reception of documentary films on war, dialogic approaches to representing mental illness, ethics regarding visual elicitation as interview method.

Funding

Besides the Velux Foundation grant (2019-21), Frølunde has received funding for her post.doc. research (2009-11) at RUC 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.
Previous funded research work are grant from Linneaus University, Sweden (2009) on digital storytelling. She was the sole Danish researcher funded by the Norwegian Media Council, as part of the Scandinavian project Making a Filmmaker (2008-09) on young Scandinavian filmmakers.

Her PhD (2004-09) was funded in part by KINO under the research project DREAM (Danish Research on Education and Advanced Media) led by Professor 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 training and practical experience in visual communication, visual art, design, computer human interaction, as well as 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).