I am a doctoral researcher in comparative literature, author, translator (eng-fin) and teacher of creative writing. In 2025–2026, I work for the Kone Foundation funded project, Visibilising Counter-Stories of Mental Distress (MadEnCounters, 2023–2026), which is affiliated with the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. In 2024, I worked for the Kone foundation funded project, Intersectional Reading, Social Justice and Literary Activism (INTERACT 2022–2025).

I am interested in daughter-mother relationships, intersectional life-writing, decolonization of knowledge and the intersections of fiction, narrative non-fiction and academic text. 

In my free time, I am active in Nahlieli – Jews for Justice in Palestine, and Sumud – The Finnish Palestine Network. 

In my PhD thesis, I study intersectional life-writing through the concept of daughtering (tytärtäminen, a translation of mine and a concept that hasn’t been studied in Finland before). 

In my research, I focus on memoirs by American and British mixed-race daughters of both white and non-white mothers. I also collect data, ie. pieces of life-writing, by Finnish mixed-race daughters, through creative writing groups, held in Finland. In my work, daughtering is seen as a parallel, but disregarded, concept to mothering, the idea that mothers are not just biological beings but that motherhood is a social construct, an institution, which consists of certain repetitions.

I aim to answer the following questions:

How is daughtering being told, and through what kinds of acts and repetitions it is formed in intersectional life-writing? How are historic and contemporary power structures manifested intersectionally in daughter-mother relationships, and how do daughter-mother relationships uphold power structures? What kinds of particular features appear in life-writing when looked through the lens of black feminist epistemology, intersectionality, and mixed-race studies? How can counterstories and creative writing be used as tools for critical thinking around the psychic pain and social questions in daughter-mother relationships? 

I have taught courses on daughtering and mothering, intersectionality, and life-writing both through the HILMA Gender Studies Network and at the University of Turku. Outside of the academia, I teach creative writing to both youth and adults.