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The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard is a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies (VES). Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone.
SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of work which is itself constitutively visual or acoustic — that is conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems — and which may thus complement the human sciences’ and humanities’ traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. The instruction offered through SEL is thus distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based, and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, nonfiction image-making.
News:
02.22.11 Foreign Parts, a video by FSC fellow Véréna PARAVEL and Social Anth PhD student J.P. Sniadecki, wins the Best Film award at DocsBarcelona Film Festival, and plays for a week at MoMA, New York, March 10-16. Foreign Parts also has won the Prize for Best Film at Punto de Vista.
01.29.11The McGill Daily: "The Intelligence of the Senses: The movement to bring human experience into academia" by Megan Galeucia and Ariel Appel
01.20.11 Anthropology News, January 2011: Read "Aesthetic Experience and Applied Acoustemology: Blue Sky, White River Liner Notes" by Stephanie Spray (PhD candidate, Social Anthropology Program).
12.06.10 J.P. Sniadecki wins the Prize for Most Innovative Film from the Sardinia International Ethnographic Film Festival for "Chaiqian/Demolition." The jury's official statement proclaimed: "A statement about observation, the photographic frame, and the qualities of digital photography that allow us to enter the world of Chinese migrant workers and the rapidly changing urban landscape of Chengdu; the deep phenomelogically informed style results in a detailed and sensuous ethnography."
11.29.10. Foreign Parts, a film by Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki (USA) wins 'Best Ethno-Anthropological Film' at the 51st Festival Dei Popoli "for its courage of questioning the traditional approach of anthropological research by choosing the U.S. as the object of its investigation. The desperate community living in the Willets Point junk-yard embodies the conflicts of the American Dream."