Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for History and is part of Fenneke Sysling's ERC Starting Grant project COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia. He is currently working on a book project examining the construction of 'Asian' Diabetes in global health discourse.

More information about Mohammad Bin Khidzer

Fields of interest

Medical Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Postcolonial History of Medicine, Global and Transnational Southeast Asia.

Research

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History, Leiden University. Prior to joining Leiden University, I did my PhD in Sociology (Science Studies) at the University of California, San Diego. My research is interdisciplinary, and engages with fields such as the social studies of science, technology and medicine, medical sociology, sociology of race and ethnicity, history of medicine, and global and transnational Southeast Asia. I am broadly interested in how categories are constructed, given meaning, and affect various spheres of society.

My PhD dissertation focused on race, diabetes and public health in Singapore between 1900-2020. Taking the ongoing War on Diabetes in the tiny island nation as my starting point, I trace the different ways in which diabetes emerged as medically, culturally and politically salient throughout its history while also attending to its racialization. I situate my analysis within broader social, institutional and technoscientific transformations such as colonialism, postcolonial nation building, Cold War developmentalism, the rise of multilateral global health organizations, the diabetes epidemic and more recently, advancements in genomic medicine.

My current book project extends my examination of diabetes in postcolonial Singapore to ask how diabetes knowledge that emerged (and continues to emerge) from the island nation becomes folded into a larger global health programme concerning Asian Diabetes. What do experts mean by 'Asian' Diabetes? What role does Singapore play in the construction of the diabetes epidemic in Asia and Asian diasporic populations? What are the social, historical, political and technical components that enable the framing of diabetes as 'Asian' in global health discourse? Last but not least, what do we miss when focusing on Asian genetics, body shape, or diet in tackling the diabetes epidemic? These are the questions that form the foundation of my book manuscript during my postdoctoral term in Leiden.