Professor Friedner is the Chair of the Department of Comparative Human Development and a social and medical anthropologist whose work examines both the category of and experience of “deafness” and “disability,” particularly in urban India. She is interested in how political economic changes in India have created new opportunities and constraints for deaf and disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life. Her recent book, Sensory Futures, explores cochlear implants in India and the kinds of sensory, modal, and social lives they facilitate. Within the broader category of disability, much of Prof. Friedner’s work focuses on deafness as a productive site for interrogating questions of language, personhood, and sociality. Through individual and collaborative research and writing endeavors, she worked to place disability and deafness in anthropological and other scholarly conversations about the state, the senses, and urban planning and development, as examples.