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.

Project Title: Emergent Logistics and Experimental Ethnography

“Emergent Logistics and Experimental Ethnography,” explores the problem of methodological engagement with the complex patterns of logistical movement that power the circulation of money and energy globally. Building upon our previous work, “Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds,” we aim to expand our Experimental Field School to the diverse geographies of commerce, speculation, finance, energy-production, and distribution. Our project interrogates these processes through sites such as Chicago’s e-commerce facilities, banking firms, and energy plants that power the transportation hubs and data centers of the city, to Delhi’s expansive networks of gasoline and diesel transportation, electric rickshaws, and emerging transition to sustainable energy systems and decarbonization. We plan to cultivate permanent networks of research at the University of Chicago and the UChicago Delhi Center by inviting scholars from around the world to join our Experimental Field Schools, where we will develop methodological approaches to pressing logistical questions through site visits, observation, and collaborative design. 

Biography:
Jennifer Cole is Professor and Chair of Comparative Human Development, and Co-Chair of the Committee on African Studies. Her work examines how personal change over the life course shapes, and is shaped by, broader political, economic and cultural transformations: the unruly terrain where person and history meet. Cole is the author of two monographs, Forget Colonialism: Sacrifice and the art of Memory in Madagascar (2001) and Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (2010) as well as four edited volumes.  She is currently finishing a book entitled The Foreigner’s Wife:  Migration and the Work of Alignment that develops an approach to understanding the relationship between personal aspirations that lead to migration and broader social change. Cole is the recipient of many grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim, Fulbright, ALCS, American Philosophical Society, Radcliffe Institute, and Institute for Etudes Avancées, Paris as well as the divisional prize for excellence in graduate teaching.