It has been praised as an "innovative initiative"[3] at Harvard to integrate art-making within the cognitive life of the university, and was proposed as a model for future endeavors in the graduate curriculum by the Presidential Task Force on the Arts' Report in 2008.
[4] The SEL is managed by musician, anthropologist, and phonographer Ernst Karel, and directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, ethnographic filmmaker of In and Out of Africa and Sweetgrass.
[5] In the year-long core class, "Sensory Ethnography," students receive instruction in ethnographic media practices, and create a substantial work in video, still photography, hypermedia, or sound.
Advanced graduate students are also provided with training and equipment to produce media ethnographies in conjunction with their written doctoral dissertations.
[6] One example includes students working alongside Ernst Karel and visual artist Sharon Lockhart to produce "Sound Safari", a collaborative phonography project, in Bath, Maine.