Diabetes – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Mohammad Bin Khidzer

This short memo is based on the authors short field trips in Jogjakarta and Singapore in June and July 2025. It examines whether walking can prevent type 2 diabetes in tropical cities. Drawing on fieldwork in Singapore and Jogjakarta, the author shows how climate, infrastructure and socioeconomic inequality shape people’s ability to walk. While Singapore’s shaded walkways and transport network allow for active mobility, Jogjakarta’s heat, traffic and lack of pavements make walking difficult. The author demonstrates that in hot, humid contexts, “walking for health” depends on urban design and environment, and that for low-income diabetics facing food and medication insecurity, walking alone is not sufficient. The essay calls for diabetes-prevention strategies that integrate climate, infrastructure and inequality.

Read the full memo here.

By Amy Moran-Thomas

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar” -or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas -a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.

Read the book here.

Tag: Diabetes

Walking Away Diabetes in the Tropics: A Reflection

Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic