MEET OUR INVITED SPEAKERS

LOH CHIN EE

Loh Chin Ee is Associate Professor at the English Language and Literature Department and Associate Dean (Impact & Partnerships) at the Office for Research at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Her research focuses for young people’s reading at the intersection of globalisation, equity, and technological changes as well as the role of school libraries in fostering reading for pleasure and lifelong learning. She is the Principal and Co-Principal investigator of more than SGD$5M worth of grants, the most current being Reading Futures Study: A Longitudinal Cross-Case Comparison of Adolescents’ Print and Digital Reading Practices. Her most recent book, The Reading Lives of Teens: Research & Practice (Routledge, 2024), was awarded the UKLA Academic Book Award 2025. She is Senior Editor of Pedagogies: An International Journal and Host of the How We Read podcast.

KRISTIINA KUMPULAINEN

Kristiina Kumpulainen is Professor and Head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, and Docent in Education at the University of Helsinki. She is a Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the International Academy of Education. Her research explores how literacies become entangled with imagination, care, and agency across human and more-than-human worlds. Drawing on sociocultural, posthuman, and design-based perspectives, she investigates how learners engage in worldmaking through digital, material, and ecological literacies. Through creative methodologies, including augmented storying, makerspaces, and participatory arts, her work reimagines literacy as a relational and transformative practice that nurtures new possibilities for learning and coexistence. Kumpulainen’s scholarship has shaped international conversations on digital literacies, learning ecologies, and participatory pedagogies, inspiring educators and researchers to envision literacies that empower imagination, responsibility, and collective futures of care.

HELEN ADAM

Helen Adam is an Associate Professor and Researcher in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. She is also the President of the Board of the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia (PETAA). Helen’s research focuses on promoting equitable education and learning environments through publication and use of authentically diverse literature to empower all learners and to help break down barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding. Her work is published in internationally renowned journals, and she is frequently called on for expert media comment and as a presenter to diverse audiences of educators and academics. In 2023, Helen undertook a Churchill Fellowship to the USA and UK meeting with leading international academics investigating ways to enhance expertise in children's books as vehicles for disrupting prejudice and discrimination the culmination of this is her newly released book: Creating Equitable Literacy Learning Environment: A Transformative Model (Routledge, 2026).