Toby Lee (NYU)
Tuesday, January 19, 2016, 5pm in FB 630.15 [Global Emergent Media Lab]
“The Sensory Ethnography Lab: Community of Practice, Space of Play”
Since its inception in 2006, the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University has produced a body of non-fiction media work that has been met with both wide acclaim and marked criticism. In this talk, Toby Lee presents a critical overview of the Lab and its work — attending to questions of aesthetics, ethics, politics and practice — and reconsiders the value of a space like the SEL for the fields of documentary, anthropology, and the visual arts, as well as institutions of higher education.
Toby Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University. Her research interests include visual and media anthropology; the anthropology of cultural institutions; cultural citizenship; film festival studies; expanded documentary. A practicing artist, she works across a variety of media including video, installation, performance and drawing.
https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/cinema-studies/110399308