ADIL Johan is Deputy Executive Director (Academic and Student Affairs) at the Asia-Europe Institute and senior lecturer at the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Malaya (UM). His research on music and popular culture considers interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, intimacy, affect and gender, focussing on the Malay world and Southeast Asia. He is author of Cosmopolitan Intimacies, a book on Independence-era Malay film music (NUS Press, 2018) and is co-editor of Made in Nusantara: Studies in popular music (Routledge, 2021). He has also published articles in the Journal of Intercultural Studies (2019); Kajian Malaysia (2019); JATI-Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2022) and Indonesia and the Malay World (2023). He is currently the elected Chair for the Southeast Asian branch for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-SEA)

HUEYUEN Choong is a drummer and the Head for the Department of Film and Performing Arts, School of Arts, Sunway University. His research interest primarily revolves around the music-learning cultures of popular musicians, and his latest research examines this subject matter within the Malaysian context; specifically the examination of HPME and the disturbances that such modes of becoming popular musicians caused within the popular music-making cultures. He is the author of The applicability of Anglosphere-based popular music learning culture characterisations to a Malaysian context (2023), An Evolutionary Narrative of Popular Music Learning Cultures: A Case Study of the United Kingdom (2022), as well as The Learning Experiences and Musical Proficiencies of Formal and Informal Popular Musicians in Malaysia (2022).

LARA Katrina T. Mendoza is an ethnomusicologist whose expertise and research interests are in Pinoy hip-hop, live sports commentary, and literary analysis. Her educational degrees are in the Humanities (AB), Literature (MA), Cognitive and Functional Linguistics (MaNaMa), and Music (PhD). She started her Ateneo de Manila teaching journey at the Department of English in 1996 where she taught courses on Basic English, Essay, Short Story, and her favourite, Poetry and Drama. She joined the Department of Development Studies in 2019 to helm initiatives in Popular Culture and Development. Lara works closely with the International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Southeast Asia (IASPM-SEA) whose members are scholars from across the globe and experts on musicology, culture studies, and their cognates. In her capacity as a member of the Executive Committee from 2022 to the present, she has consistently guided students in exploring their research interests in subcultural, media, and popular music studies, organising scholarly and creative forums that provide discoursal space for (very) young scholars and amateur fans from around the world to share their work in engaging formats

RACHEL Ong Shu Ying is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (Austria) and works as a University Assistant there where she lectures and performs some administrative duties. Her doctoral project explores queer musicking in Kuala Lumpur, complicated by the intersections of race, religion, politics, and class.Previously, she served as the vice-chair of the ICTMD Study Group on Music, Gender and Sexuality (2019 – 2023). In February 2023, she published a book review for Made in Nusantara: Studies in Popular Music edited by Adil Johan and Mayco A.Santaella in the ICTMD Yearbook of Traditional Music (Cambridge Press). Aside from academic work, she plays regularly with Nyai Rara Saraswati gamelan group in Graz and immerses herself in Ballroom culture doing voguing.