Simon Creak is a historian of Laos and Southeast Asia and Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on the history and politics of nationalism, regionalism, socialism, sport and Cold War Asia. Besides his research on Laos, Simon has published widely on sport, nationalism and regional diplomacy in Southeast Asia. He is author of Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (2015), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Laos, Fourth Edition (2023) and is currently writing a cultural and political history of the Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games), the region's premier sports event, since the 1950s.

Holly High is an anthropologist, does fieldwork in Laos and uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to understand human experience. She was trained at Australian National University, and has held postdoctoral positions or fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, Sydney, and Deakin Universities. Holly has written about anthropological approaches to debt, power and desire; psychoanalytic theory and anthropology; Lao policy (including cultural, poverty, health and agricultural policies) in relation to lived experience in that country; everyday politics in Laos; and religion in Laos. Currently, Holly is investigating transformations in pregnancy, birth and early childhood in Laos.

Oliver Tappe is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Cologne. His work is located at the interstices between social anthropology and history, with a particular focus on mainland Southeast Asia. In his most recently concluded research project (at the University of Heidelberg, funded by the German Research Foundation), Oliver investigated labour relations, livelihood transformations and sociocultural change in the tin mining area of Khammouane province (central Laos). In his current project-in cooperation with Vanina Bouté (EHESS Paris)-he shifts his focus towards longstanding Chinese communities in northern Laos, their local cultural practices, social networks and perceptions of the new Laos-China dynamics. Tappe has published on different issues such as Lao PDR historiography, socio-political dynamics in the Laos-Vietnam borderlands, historical patterns of labour mobility, and local ethnohistory.