Academic career
Susser has held faculty appointments at Case Western Reserve University,SUNY Old Westbury,and the City University of New York,where she was named Distinguished Professor in 2017. Susser served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College from 2012 to 2016. [4]
Susser has also held several positions in professional organizations in anthropology. She is a founding president of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for the Anthropology of North America [5] and a past president of the American Ethnological Society. [6] She is also a co-founding editor of Anthropology Now and FocaalBlog,and served for a decade as the U.S. editor of Critique of Anthropology . [7]
Susser is the founder and editor of the Social Transformations in American Anthropology Series at the NYU Press. [8]
Research
Susser's research interests span urban studies,medical anthropology,international health,political economy,gender studies,and social movements,with long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the United States,South Africa,Puerto Rico,France,and Spain.
Norman Street:Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood
Susser’s early ethnographic work focused on a working-class neighborhood in Greenpoint-Williamsburg during and after New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis. This research culminated in her first book Norman Street, which examines social transformation under conditions of inequality,austerity,and neoliberal restructuring. In Norman Street,Susser argues that urban poverty and neighborhood decline are produced by political and economic decisions,challenging the culture of poverty explanations prevalent at the time. She shows how deindustrialization,austerity policies,and the retrenchment of municipal services reshaped everyday life for working-class residents. [9]
Susser also argues that politics is embedded in everyday interactions with welfare officials,landlords,employers,and city agencies,and that neighborhood conflicts over housing,fire protection,and services are forms of class struggle,even when residents do not frame them in these terms. Far from being apathetic or disorganized,Susser shows how residents organize,cooperate,and protest to defend their neighborhood,even as their efforts are constrained by economic dependency,racial and ethnic divisions,and uneven access to political power. Susser shows that kinship,friendship,and mutual aid among women are essential survival strategies under conditions of poverty and also form the social infrastructure that makes political mobilization possible. At the same time,these networks are strained by welfare regulations,housing insecurity,and labor market instability.
Setha M. Low has called the book a landmark ethnography,marking the introduction of the political economy approach in urban anthropology. [10]
AIDS,Sex and Culture:Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa
In the 1990s and 2000s,Susser conducted extensive research on HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, [11] Puerto Rico, [12] and the United States. Her book AIDS,Sex and Culture:Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa analyzes the gendered and political dimensions of global health research,funding,and activism. The book argues that HIV/AIDS in southern Africa is not primarily a biomedical crisis but a political,economic,and gendered one,produced and intensified by globalization,neoliberal policy,and entrenched gender inequalities. While scientific knowledge and treatments exist,they repeatedly fail to protect women because prevention and care are designed without adequate attention to women’s lived social realities,including poverty,labor migration,unequal power in sexual relationships,caregiving burdens,and restrictions on reproductive and sexual autonomy. Susser argues that global health policies,particularly especially those shaped by the United States' funding priorities,ignore women’s needs,even as women bear a disproportionate burden from the virus in regard to infection,care,and social reproduction. Simultaneously,Susser emphasizes that women are not passive victims;they develop pragmatic,non-moralistic forms of “good sense”and collective resistance that point toward more democratic and effective responses to AIDS. [13]
Anthropologists Setha Low and Sally Engle Merry cite the book as an example of "engaged anthropology," [14] and the book is considered distinctive for its historical method and wide-ranging scope. [15] In 2011 the book was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology. [16]
In addition to her scholarship,Susser is also engaged in AIDS activism. in 2006 Susser co-founded the ATHENA Network,an advocacy organization for women's and girls' human rights,gender equality,and leadership in response to HIV/AIDS,and serves as one of its steering committee members. In a 2015 Al Jazeera America op-ed,Susser argued that a study of daily antiretroviral pills and gels to prevent HIV in women in South Africa,published in the New England Journal of Medicine,failed not because of participants’deceit or noncompliance but because its design overlooked the social,cultural,and behavioral realities of the women involved,underscoring that effective HIV prevention requires more than biomedical solutions alone. [17] Susser has also published op-eds about the role of feminism in the advocating for microbicide treatment of AIDS,as well as the negative impact drugs patents and intellectual property regulations have on access to HIV/AIDS treatment. [18] [19]
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