AUTHOR
I’m Sissi, a Finnish journalist, storyteller and consultant in communication who has dedicated most of her life to interpreting and creating content on cultural phenomena, intercultural communication and individual life stories. I’ve lived in 9 countries, speak 8 languages and have travelled for extensive periods of time in the Americas, Africa and Europe, mostly hitchhiking and long-distance cycling. I’m a woman obsessed with how languages and education shape our reality, enraged with chauvinism of all kind.
This platform is about people and intercultural awareness, cultural differences and similarities. It’s about exploring life on the road (I cycled from Argentina to Mexico 2015–2018) and observing culture-bound thought patterns even when still. Lately, this has also become a space for what it means to be a woman in Latin America – for locals as well as myself.
A Life of Cultures
Since my early childhood I’ve had a culturally complex life. Due to my father’s international career, I found myself communicating in Finnish and body language with Dutch friends at the age of four, learning to distinguish a North American from Chinese at the age of five and receiving unexpected cheek kisses from a Portuguese lad at the age of six.
When I was eight, my family moved to the USA, with me knowing only one word in English: lipstick. That and monkey bars were the starting point into my making new friends at school. Seven years later we moved to Austria, where my German level was more or less at the level of Das Auto upon my arrival at the Wirtschaftskundlichesbundesrealgymnasium. All through high school I spent my summers waitressing in Italy, which is where I stayed to study after high school (and where I returned to work for a couple of years on several occasions). Then I moved to Poland (after studying languages in Finland for a while) first for work, then to do a BA in Social and Cultural Sciences at the Polish-German border (specializing in media studies and sociolinguistics. I’m still convinced that media and languages are two things that shape our minds more than anything. From there, I returned to Finland to complete a MA in Intercultural Encounters and Comparative Religion. For those of you interested in academics, my BA thesis was about Apartheid and Wittgenstein (oral part) and about the conflict between religious freedom and freedom of expression (written part). My MA thesis was about the representation of the Finnish Roma minority in school books.
Before, during and after university, I’ve put into praxis my devotion for intercultural encounters. When abroad, this has been done through hitchhiking, couchsurfing and cycling. When working, I’ve striven for sharing intercultural knowledge through the media (e.g. as scriptwriter, as programmer for a documentary film festival, as videojournalist, as cameraman for a documentary film and as journalist for various magazines), by writing regularly about hiv in Finland and by designing and giving courses on intercultural communication. In January 2017, I co-founded a Finnish online travel magazine for women, Seikkailijattaret which I have since then withdrawn from.
I love exploring cultures and teaching about them, learning languages and observing and interpreting people-related phenomena. I adore extreme sports (rock climbing, paragliding, diving…) and dance. Lately, I have also become interested in digital anthropology and intercultural communication on the internet.
This platform is where I share what I see, think and experience. For more information, articles and interviews, please click here.
