Online Guardian documentary: Quipu Project – social justice phone line in Peru (2017)

The Quipu Project is an interactive documentary about women and men who were sterilised in Peru in the mid-1990s. Many did not give full consent for it to happen.Since 2000, organised groups of sterilised women and men have campaigned for the sterilisations to be acknowledged and compensated. The campaigners are hindered by several crucial factors. The majority of them live in remote regions with no internet access, many have not completed primary schooling and only speak the local language, Quechua, rather than the Spanish spoken by most legislators. Twenty years later, they are still seeking justice.

Through an interplay between a low-tech telephone line and a high-tech digital interface, the Quipu Project enables communities that are politically, geographically and digitally marginalised to tell their stories around the world using the internet. Contributors can also use the phone line to listen and respond to each other, providing an infrastructure of support that can operate across a dispersed community. Furthermore, by archiving the collaborators’ testimonies publicly online, it ensures that their oral accounts are not lost.

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