Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist who researches deaf and disabled peoples’ social, moral, and economic experiences in urban areas of India. She is interested in how political economic changes in India create new opportunities and constraints for disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life. She also researches how international and domestic development initiatives both help and hinder disabled people in India and elsewhere in the world. Dr. Friedner analyzes how questions of disability and development might pose a challenge to current research in critical development theory. Most broadly, Dr. Friedner explores how disabled people create inhabitable presents and futures as they navigate complex social, political, and economic structures that seemingly privilege able bodies. As an anthropologist invested in ethnography, her research is very much influenced by the disciplines of Human Geography, South Asian Studies, and Disability Studies. Currently, Dr. Friedner is engaged in two new research projects. The first looks at the circulation of representations of disability in certain Indian public spheres and how this circulation creates new ways of imagining and envisioning national unity in India; disability functions as a form of "feel good" diversity. The second looks at the multiple economies involved in becoming a sign language interpreter in the United States.