Ida Susser, Roosevelt House Faculty Associate and Hunter Professor of Anthropology, will be appearing on the Brian Lehrer Show at 7:30 PM ET tonight, June 19th, 2013. Watch live on CUNY TV, Channel 75 in New York City, or check back here tomorrow for video.
Susser is renowned for her ethnographic research with respect to urban social movements in the United States and the gendered politics, local, national and global of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Puerto Rico and southern Africa.
Her latest publication: Updated Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (Oxford University Press 2012) features a new section, 
Claiming a Right to New York City which discusses the changing neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn from the original ethnography which began with the New York City fiscal crisis and the occupation of the People’s Firehouse in 1975 to the Occupy movement of 2011.
The original edition of this book (Oxford 1982) explores working class consciousness, racism, ethnic identities and gender in the emergence of social movements in Greenpoint- Williamsburg Brooklyn sparked by the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, as the first neoliberal experiment.
The Updated Edition features a new section “Claiming a Right to New York City”. Based on thirty years of research in New York City with respect to poverty and homelessness as well as interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to urbanism, the book draws on the concept of the Wounded City, first outlined by Susser and Schneider in their edited volume, Wounded Cities (Berg 2003) to demonstrate the way in which assaults on a city, such as the tragedy of 9/11 or the 2008 Great Recession, open up channels for major corporate interventions which can more easily bypass democratic questioning under such shocking conditions (similar to Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” published in 2007) The book documents the displacement of the Latino/a population through gentrification over the past decades as well as the collaboration of artists, actors, dancers, theater directors, writers and working class people in mobilizing to improve environmental and living conditions. However, it shows the ways in which all these groups were threatened in the rezoning process instigated by Mayor Bloomberg in 2001 to attract major corporate investors and an upscale international elite. The Updated edition follows the battle to save the affordable housing, diverse population, parks, swimming pool and accessible riverfront views which the community organizations had helped to create.
More on her appearance from the Brian Lehrer Show: “In this week’s Public Intellectual, where we highlight new research that changes our thinking and public policy, a Pew study shows women are now the primary or sole breadwinners in four of 10 households with children. Brian gets reaction, not all of it positive, from guests, Carmella T.M. Marrone, founder of the Women & Work program at Queens College; Hunter College anthropologist Ida Susser, author of “Norman Street, Poverty & Politics in an Urban Neighborhood”; and via Skype from Princeton University, professor Imani Perry of the Center for African-American Studies.”
