Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and Science studies at the University of California San Diego. In July 2024, I will begin my appointment as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History, Leiden University. 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 current project focuses 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. Parts of this research have been published in Science, Technology and Human Values and is forthcoming at East Asian Science, Technology and Society.

Aside from race, diabetes and public health, I have also published an ethnography on transnational retirement migration in Malaysia, as well as a co-authored a paper comparing how ethnoracial communities in Vietnam and Singapore make sense of data from population genetics research. Presently, I have started two projects that seek to locate ideas and ‘things’ related to Southeast Asia, within a broader global and transnational network of actors and institutions. The first examines the scientific networks linking Singapore, Hong Kong and the US that co-create the ‘Asian Diabetes’ research program. My second project examines agritech in Southeast Asia, specifically how patented, lab developed rice reshapes ‘rice politics’ in the region.