Nataya Friedan
Nataya Friedan is a Postdoctoral Associate in Urban Climate Mitigation and Adaptation at the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities. Nataya is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on climate adaptation and misinformation in North American cities. Her current book project, Selling Swampland to Yankees, is about the political life of scientific evidence in Houston, Texas, an oil industry town experiencing climate change impacts. Her ethnography follows businessmen, politicians, residents, and activists as they renegotiate the economic concept of externality in the day-to-day process of planning flood infrastructure. Nataya's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation.
Nataya was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. In 2023, she received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. During graduate school, Nataya cofounded Collectivo Catalyst, an advocacy network and educational fellowship program rethinking the War on Drugs with young people and educators across North and South America. Collectivo Catalyst's program and curriculum materials enable participants to connect their personal experiences across scales and borders to the macro-political objects of knowledge and policy that have thoroughly impacted their lives. Prior to graduate school, Nataya worked as a Program Manager at the Roosevelt Institute in New York City and for Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) in Mumbai.
