Ida Susser

Ida Susser (6 July 1950) is a South African-born American anthropologist. Susser is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. 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.

Anthropologists Setha Low and Sally Engle Merry cite the book as an example of "engaged anthropology," and the book is considered distinctive for its historical method and wide-ranging scope. In 2011 the book was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology.

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. 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.

The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century

Susser’s recent research has focused on political polarization, protest movements, and struggles over the urban commons in Europe and the United States. She has conducted ethnographic work in New York, Paris and Barcelona examines street protests and democratic experimentation under austerity politics. In The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century, Susser argues that the Yellow Vests movement constitutes an experiment in democratic renewal grounded in the practices of commoning, rather than simply reactions to austerity, neoliberalism, or political crisis.