Fighting for Freedom and Human Rights with/for Incarcerated Women
Carol Jacobsen, artist/filmmaker, Director of Women’s Justice & Clemency Project and Professor, University of Michigan
When: April 6, 2016, from 4:00 to 6:00
Where: YLS Room 122
Refreshments Provided
Drawing on long-term relationships, activism, filmmaking and public education in her roles as artist, political organizer, University of Michigan professor and Director of the Women’s Justice & Clemency Project in Michigan, Carol Jacobsen’s presentation discusses strategies of resistance and hope for freedom for women caught in a prison system named by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as among the worst in the nation for human rights violations against women in custody including rapes, four point chaining, solitary confinement, medical abuse and other atrocities. This presentation will include short clips from Jacobsen’s films narrated by women prisoners, nine of whom have been freed from life sentences through the efforts of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project.
Carol Jacobsen is an artist/filmmaker, writer and political organizer on behalf of freedom and human rights with/for incarcerated women. Her work draws on long term relationships, interviews, court files and historical records of women in prison to confront issues of women’s criminalization, human rights violations and censorship. She has served as director of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project for over 25 years, a grassroots effort that has successfully freed 9 women from life sentences and protested torture in Michigan prisons. Her visual work, co-sponsored by Amnesty International and represented in New York by Denise Bibro Gallery, has been screened and exhibited nationally and internationally. Her critical writings have appeared in Penn Journal of Law & Social Change, Signs Feminist Journal, Hastings Women’s Law Journal, Art Journal and other publications. She is Professor of Art, Women’s Studies and Human Rights at the University of Michigan, and her current book in progress is For Dear Life: Focusing on Women’s Criminalization and Human Rights (University of Michigan Press).
Co- Sponsors:
The Film and Media Studies Program
Schell Center of International Human Rights
Global Health Justice Partnership
Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program