Nataya Friedan

Nataya Friedan is a PhD Candidate at Stanford Department of Anthropology in the Culture and Society track. She researches climate change misinformation. Her current project, “Oil and Water; Climate Change Attribution in Houston, Texas,” is about the political life of scientific evidence during the intensified flood infrastructure planning process after Hurricane Harvey. Her ethnographic and archival research addresses anti-science sentiment along the Gulf Coast where engineers, lawyers and business professionals negotiated facts and factuality across concrete and through floodwaters. Her ethnography situates truth making amidst culture wars in this section of the American West defined by oil and threatened by water.

In addition to her academic work, Nataya also co-founded and developed structural violence framed curriculum for Catalyst, a program that brought together young people and educators from across the Americas to rethink drug education and the War on Drugs (www.catalyst-catalizador.org). Nataya brings the arts-based pedagogy that she developed with Catalyst into her university level teaching and maintains an art practice (www.natayafriedan.com).