Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, has published an essay entitled “Framed/Reframed/Framing: Time Like Zeroes,” in For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus, by Carol Jacobsen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019).

The essay analyzes Jacobsen’s video work with incarcerated women as a mobile and mobilized reframing of feminist politically engaged media that moves beyond the text and the frame to situate artistic interventions in specific places, bodies, regions, and political movements.

Jacobsen is one of the leading feminist experimental video artists who has spent a lifetime collaborating with and advocating for incarcerated women through video, installation, photography, testimony, and prison reform initiatives through the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project.

For Dear Life chronicles Carol Jacobsen’s deep commitment to the causes of justice and human rights, and focuses a critical lens on an American criminal-legal regime that imparts racist, gendered, and classist modes of punishment to women lawbreakers.

The faces, letters, and testimonies of dozens of incarcerated women with whom Jacobsen has worked present a visceral yet politicized chorus of voices against the criminal-legal systems. 

Their voices are joined by those of leading feminist scholars in essays that illuminate the arduous methods of dissent that Jacobsen and the others have employed to win freedom for more than a dozen women sentenced to life imprisonment, and to free many more from torturous prison conditions.