Profile

Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist and an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development. She has conducted research in India with Indian Sign Language speakers, on disability advocacy movements, and on efforts to introduce biotechnological intervention such as cochlear implants. She is interested in the ways that disability is increasingly becoming normalized at the same time that biotechnological interventions for disability are also becoming normalized. At the University of Chicago, she teaches courses in disability and design, the anthropology of disability, and general medical anthropology and social theory courses.