People

I am a professor of intercultural and technology-mediated communication at the Department of Language and Communication Sciences. I lead the international master’s program Language, Globalization and Intercultural Communication (LAGIC). My background is a PhD in speech communication, that is, I specialize in studying the interaction between people in different environments. I have been the chairman of the Finnish game research association, Prologos ry (a society for communication and interaction research) and the Digital Games Research Section of the European Communication and Education Research Association (ECREA).

I have always been interested in the relationship between humans and communication technology. About how we use technology to build groups, communities and societies. I have studied, for example, online communities and virtual teams, i.e. the reality of distributed work. In addition, I have tried to understand how we construct nationality, ethnicity and other social categories that are so important to us on the internet. In all of these, one central question is the discursive construction of the categories of “us” and “those others”. The central challenge of intercultural communication is to find ways to build a functional interaction despite possible boundaries and divisions.

I work as a university lecturer in applied linguistics at the Department of Language and Communication Sciences and the person in charge of the bachelor’s and master’s program of the Monia language specialist. My areas of expertise are discourse research, social interaction, institutional and professional practices, and changing work communities, cultures and professions. I teach courses on discourse research, working life interaction and language and communication expertise. I am a docent of interaction research.