Katja FRIMBERGER

I am Lecturer in Education at the University of Strathclyde, teaching  undergraduate students in the area of drama education, critical theory and research methods.

As community arts worker and researcher, I have lead on a range of participatory filmmaking/digital animation projects with long-term collaborator filmmaker Simon Bishopp, funded through Creative Scotland and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Our current joint digital arts project 'Little Animation Studio' (LAS) is a partnership with the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and Harmeny Education Trust.

'Little Animation Studio' is an innovative digital animation project that uses latest digital animation technology to support children with complex social, emotional and behavioural needs to create their own high-quality fully-animated short film in an intuitive way. The children's animated film will be exhibited at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art as their Community Arts Exhibition from July 2020.

I was Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London, where I taught Applied Theatre, critical theory and Directing for the BA Theatre. Prior to that, I was Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, theorising the role of the arts (filmmaking, theatre pedagogy) in multilingual and intercultural education research contexts.

I am also a qualified language teacher and have taught German and English in secondary, tertiary and adult education in Scotland, Venezuela and Germany.

I like to map the socio-aesthetic processes and explore the wider educational, philosophical and political questions that emerge from an individual's engagement in shared, communal art-making.

I am curious about the (explicit and implicit) value discourse that underpins our arts pedagogies in education & research, especially when creative endeavours are claimed for the project of social and cultural inclusion of children and young people.

I have published on Bertolt Brecht's theatre of estrangement as a form of intercultural pedagogy & philosophical ethnography; the ethics of performative approaches in intercultural education; the role of filmmaking as a migratory research aesthetics; and neo-materialist arts-based research.

Most recently, I worked with social-anarchist philosophy of education to theorise the value of narrative agency & social hope in a participatory filmmaking project with young people (unaccompanied asylum seekers and refugees) who wanted to make films to support other new young arrivals in the process of making home in Scotland. 

I am also part of a team of creative arts practitioners, language teachers and academics from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and the UK working on an EU funding application, with the aim to develop an international glossary for performative arts pedagogies.

My research interests include:

• Bertolt Brecht's Theatre & Pedagogy
  
• Participatory Art-Making as Philosophical Ethnography
  
• Narrative Agency in Participatory Filmmaking
  
• Care/Situation Ethics (Nel Noddings, John Dewey)
• Critical/Utopian Pedagogy 
• Social-Anarchist Philosophy of Education
  

I am a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.

I lead on the Social Issues in Education module and contribute to the Exploring Creativities in Practice, the Curriculum: The Arts, Social Research Methods & Arts-Infused Curriculum modules at the School of Education.

I received a full PhD scholarship from the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, which resulted in a thesis that explored international students' intercultural experiences through a participatory, philosophical ethnography rooted in a Brechtian notion of Verfremdung (estrangement).

I hold an M.A. in Drama and Theatre Studies from University College Cork in Ireland.

My M.Ed. (Education, with English and German) comes from Universität Hildesheim in Germany, where I also qualified as a secondary school teacher for German & English in the federal state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen).