Susan Sered

Susan Sered is professor of sociology at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of more than half a dozen books including "Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity" and "Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility."

Sered's ethnographic work explores how individuals and groups experience suffering, illness, death and birth as well as the ways in which powerful institutions manage, or do not manage, to exert control over those experiences.

Over the years she has studied the domestic lives of pious elderly Kurdish Jewish women in Jerusalem, the ritual practices of Okinawan priestesses, the ideologies of holistic healers who work with breast cancer patients in the US, the struggles of Americans who do not have health insurance, and the day-to-day experiences of criminalized women in the Boston area.

Most recently, Sered has applied a sociological and feminist lens to writing about her own experiences with endometrial cancer. View her website at http://susan.sered.name/.

Committed both to scholarship and to social justice, Sered works closely with advocacy and community organizations on issues of health, gender equity and ending mass incarceration.

I am working with OBOS because I believe that knowledge is power. For more than half a century OBOS has helped women acquire the knowledge that allows us to understand and make decisions about our health and to navigate our health care in economic and social environments that often quash women's autonomy and well-being.