Shirley Chua Jin Lin holds a PhD degree in Asset & Facilities Management and Bachelor degree in Building Surveying from the Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. Her research interests are in Facilities Management and Analytic Hierarchy Process. She has also been involved in various research grants and has published some ISI and Scopus-indexed technical publications in journals and proceedings pertaining building maintenance and facilities management. She has also received a few awards throughout her studies and career path which include Building Surveying Excellent Award, Universiti Malaya Book Prize, Universiti Malaya Excellence Award 2015, Certificate of Excellent Service 2018 and Excellence Service Award 2020.

Shangeetha Rajah Kumaran is a Senior Lecturer and the current Head of the Department of English Language in the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at Universiti Malaya (UM), a position she has held at various times since 2021. She is also the Universiti Malaya Quality Excellence Index (UMQEI) assessor and the University's Programme Quality Assurance Expert (ProQAE), working collaboratively to enhance academic programmes, and improve standardisation and quality of documentation for accreditations. Due to her expertise in programme quality assurance, she has served as the Chair and External Panel of Assessor for the Full Accreditation of several programmes in various institutions. Her primary research interests focus on sociolinguistics and postcolonial literature, particularly, the sociolinguistic aspects of language use in literary texts, code-switching in various fields, language maintenance and shift among diasporic communities, and Malaysian Indian writings in English. Her current research work centres on translanguaging practices in the education and medical fields, as well as the visibility of languages in public spaces (linguistic landscape). She has authored and co-authored numerous articles and a book titled Diasporic Consciousness of Malaysian Indian Writings in English. She is also the recipient of the 2025 Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS).

Trained in Cultural Studies, I am a researcher engaging in interdisciplinary research on culture. My research is primarily concerned with the cultural history of modern and contemporary China through the lens of ‘folk’ or minjian. In particular, I am interested in how ‘folk’ has been discursively constructed by the state and intellectuals throughout the 20th century, and how it continues to be represented at heritage sites, folk art museums, folk art fairs, as well as contemporary art exhibitions in the 21st century. My interdisciplinary PhD training in Cultural Studies in Asia at the National University of Singapore has taught me to be a questioner, committed to promoting critical and creative thinking as a mode of living beyond academia. Being a practitioner of critical pedagogy, I always problematize preconceived ideas that have shaped our understandings of the world. As a lecturer, I believe that classroom is where knowledge is produced and challenged through productive dialogues between teachers and students. Besides teaching in the classroom, I am also an active listener keen on translating students’ personal experience and knowledge into discussion materials. Critical discussion could help students reflect upon how our perception of the world is sociologically constructed. Students are not passive learners but knowledge producers. My role as a teacher is to acknowledge students’ opinions as knowledge and situate their knowledge within a larger socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts so as to allow them to scrutinize their common sense. I am currently not available for PhD supervisions.