We exist to solve a civilisational problem: not how to produce more information, but how to ensure knowledge continues to live.
We live in an age where information has never been more abundant, yet opportunities for deep understanding have never felt more scarce.
Across universities, industries, and digital platforms alike, knowledge is increasingly expected to justify itself through its economic value: research is funded for measurable impact; education is organised around employability alone; and culture competes for attention within algorithmic feeds. Curiosity often becomes mere luxury when it doesn't translate to productivity.
But despite the wave that suppresses deep thinking, there is a growing generation of stubbornly curious individuals who continue reading after graduation, who seek thoughtful conversations beyond social media, who attend public lectures on Monday nights, and keep pursuing intellectual lives alongside their careers. They are not here for another degree or some fancy titles, but are simply hungry to find the time and space to continue thinking.
This is why The Working Theories exists as a counter-institution for knowledge: a place dedicated to keeping knowledge alive through a three-pillar cyclical model:
01 The Institute
A research institute that produces new knowledge from the archive and the field, across the humanities, arts, and culture, to counter the culture that demands us to keep asking the how while forgetting to ask the why.
02 The College
A non-degree parallel college where people can find home for their restless curiosity rather than employability, through condensed tertiary education -level humanities subjects that can be taken alongside life and work.
03 The Studio
Bespoke programmes that guide curious people into authoring inquiries of their own, through one-to-one mentorship that shepherds a learner from curiosity into a research proposal. This programme is designed for individuals who intend to continue their education for Master's or Doctoral degrees, students currently writing dissertations, or individuals who aspire to work in research and are willing to be guided in conducting one for The Institute.
Vice-Chancellor
Sheilla Njoto, PhD
Sheilla has always lived between two worlds. One is that of the scholar: a digital sociologist whose work interrogates artificial intelligence, labour, technology, gender, culture, and the social structures that shape everyday life.
The other is that of the artist she never quite stopped being.
Having finished her bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, she often jokes that she was forced into early artistic retirement by the demands of livelihood. The retirement, however, never really lasted. When she puts her books to rest at night, she dances her way around writing essays, singing, curating conversations, obsessing over Sophie Calle, and finding herself repeatedly making things she has no practical reason to make except that curiosity demands it. Research and art have never felt like separate practices to her: both begin with paying unusually close attention to the world.
Sheilla teaches at the University of Melbourne and Universitas Indonesia. Alongside academia, she has spent a decade advising governments, multilateral organisations, and technology companies on socially impactful technology, innovation, and public policy. Between 2022 and 2024, she also participated in G20 Youth engagement groups, contributing to diplomatic conversations on the future of work, responsible AI, and innovation.
Across everything she does, she keeps coming back to the same question: how might we create conditions under which people can think more deeply, imagine more generously, and live more meaningfully together?
Perhaps the closest word she has found for that pursuit is homemaking. Not homemaking in the domestic sense, but as a cultural practice: making the world feel a little more liveable, a little less lonely, and a little more capable of holding complexity without demanding certainty. Every lecture, essay, conversation, and creative project is, in some way, an attempt to build that kind of home.
The Working Theories is one expression of that lifelong project: a place where scholarship and creativity, rigour and play, criticism and hope are not competing ways of understanding the world, but companions at the same table.
Head of Insights
Dwitri Amalia
Dwitri is a researcher at heart, and a practitioner by choice. She works at the intersection of creative practice and impactful public engagement. Over the past decade, she has built partnerships with government bodies, arts organisations, and research institutions to design projects that foster dialogue and contribute to social change.
She served as Expert Staff at Indonesia's Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (now the Ministry of Culture) in 2024, a defining chapter where she helped design and carry out museum and cultural transformation on a national scale.
Dwitri has now found her home at Margin Library, where she is excited to continue creating impact and sparking cultural changes through critical thinking and creative mischief.
Head of Praxis
Lizzie Chan
Lizzie Chan is an Indonesian writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores identity, cultural inheritance, language, and collective memory. Working across poetry, performance, theatre, facilitation, and participatory art, she creates experiences that invite audiences to question inherited narratives, examine the systems they inhabit, and imagine more compassionate ways of being. Humor, intimacy, and play are central to her practice, offering accessible entry points into conversations around vulnerability, belonging, and social change.
She is the author of I broke my heart so you don't have to and Seeking Neon Buddha, both shortlisted by the Southeast Asia Queer Cultural Festival (SEAQCF). Her work has been recognized with First Place at the 2023 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival Poetry Slam and the 2024 Women's Poetry Slam. Beyond literature, she has worked across musical theatre, game writing, communications, and socially engaged arts programming, including co-writing the lyrics for Musikal Kapan Nikah, nominated at the Anugerah Musik Indonesia (AMI), and co-writing and directing Musikal Untuk Perempuan.
Lizzie is the founder of the Jakarta Poetry Slam and co-founder of the Jakarta Improv Club, initiatives dedicated to expanding access to contemporary performance and literary practices through dialogue, experimentation, and collective care. She is also an eldest Asian daughter, a lifelong practice in diplomacy, resilience, and brewing Chinese tea to the exacting standards of both her ancestors and very opinionated aunties.
