Currently, she is managing two European projects: ”CASPER: Citizen Activation in Shrinking rural areas for Place-based policies to Enhance Resilience” (Interreg Europe, 2023-2027) and ”SERIGO: Social Economy for Resilience, Inclusion and Good Life in Rural areas” (Horizon Europe, 2024-2027).

She is involved in the research project ”ESSPIN: Economic, Social and SPatial INequalities in Europe in the Era of Global Mega-trends” (Horizon Europe, 2022-2025).

Her doctoral thesis dealt with issues of regional policy, relational-governance and mega-events planning. She has been involved in European research projects (European Science Foundation, FP7) in border studies focusing on cross-border cooperation processes and the social (de)construction of borders. In her post-doctoral research, she studies foreigners’ socio-economic engagement in different Finnish urban environments with the aim of producing knowledge on the local particularities and challenges of integration processes. She was managing the international project “ECoC-SME: Actions for inducing SME growth and innovation via the ECoC event and legacy” (Interreg Europe, 2019-2021).

My primary fields of research are transculturality, imagology, German writers abroad, German film and television, the European Avant-Garde, and the Apocalypse in cultural productions. I teach all areas of German language and culture courses, including text workshops, oral communication, literature and culture courses, media and business German courses.

I am Docent in Multicultural Literature and Media Studies (University of Turku), and I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature (University of Eastern Finland). My professional career and multilingual and intercultural research projects are grounded in my enthusiasm and personal life, as I have lived and worked in several European countries over the past 20 years. I studied in Germany (Düsseldorf), Spain (Salamanca) and France (Nice), worked as a lecturer in France (Nantes) and the United Kingdom (Cambridge).

I mainly work as a researcher and university lecturer at the Department of Special Education at Åbo Akademi University, and this semester (2023-2024) also as a visiting researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. My research interests include students’ school well-being and motivation, with a particular focus on individual developmental trajectories of well-being (i.e., school engagement and burnout) and motivation (competence- and value-beliefs, and costs) during educational transitions, and the relations between well-being, motivational beliefs, academic performance, and future aspirations.