Research, storytelling and writing are the greatest passions of mine.

For me the inspirational essence of writing lies in the combination of analytic thinking and storytelling. When it becomes possible to grasp something not so easily understandable phenomena through beauty of words. That’s when I can be a researcher and a storyteller at the same time.

Without any special life plan made in the mystical beginning, my interest seem to form a continuum. First I made my master’s thesis on sexuality, sex/gender, sex education and sexual politics. Then came my doctoral thesis on family and the historical ontologisation and politisation of the family as a nuclear family in particular. Lastly, a narrative non-fiction book for non-academic audience on love and fear.

I am interested in slippery and unresolved phenomena and questions – those some of us might think are most self-evident and thus uninteresting. But that is when I wake up and become curious. It is intriguing not to understand something important. To find contradictions in it. In that sense I never grew up from those early question-asking-years. What is that? Why is it that way? To go behind the obvious is important. Curiosity (and some academic training too) made me first ask what is sex/gender and sexuality? Then what is family? And latest, what is love?

Some people might think such questions are useless. But actually that is what makes those questions so compelling: We think certain words and concepts are transparent and thus practically unloaded of expectations or politics. But they are not. The words and concepts carry a great amount of hidden meanings. And those hidden meanings are the ones we make alive. Because we tend to think the words and concepts carry a truth in them. Expectations we need to fulfill. In that sense the words have a great power over us.