Tying Quipu's Key Knots

This project takes the successes of the AHRC-funded Quipu Project and shares them with the local participants and organizations that catalysed the project and provided its driving force. Technological limitations have meant that this has not been possible, as we hoped it might have been, under our present system.

The launch of the Quipu Project in December 2015 was primarily aimed at influencing political debate in Peru in the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections. It formed part of a movement which sought to make the issue of the sterilizations a political issue, and thereby to gain justice and reparations for the people who were sterilized without their concept. The impact thus far has been considerable but felt primarily on the international and national scales, whereas the project now seeks to draw that resonance back to the regional / local levels. We are conscious of practical, ethical and scholarly imperatives to take that impact back to where it all began, to the protagonists of the Quipu story.

This project will focus on producing materials from the Quipu archive which can be used by the local organizations who provided us with our first contacts. These are the Group of Sterilized People of Independencia in Ayacucho; AMAEF-C-GTL in Cuzco, and Convenio IAMAMC-AMHBA in Huancabamba, Piura. The project will take those materials to them, organize workshops to provide skills to local leaders and participants, and empower them to act fully as agents within the research and its dissemination rather than simple objects of study.

As part of these local workshops we will record, and then transcribe, translate and publish, the participants' responses to Quipu's global reach, in order to add an extra layer of interactivity to the Quipu archive, and to problematize simplistic accounts of research impact on the global scale.

This project will therefore work to bring into dialogue the responses of local 'recipients' of impact, with broader global narratives about what 'impact' could and should be.

We will have completed the Quipu circle if we can bring our global successes back to our original participants - (1) Listening to the roots - and use our encounters in order to (2) Further Elevate Public Discourse in Peru and worldwide about the impact of this (and other) forced sterilization programmes. These outcomes will allow us to produce a video guide for projects like this, which will enable us to (3) Improve Social Innovation by carrying our learning out from the Andes and onto potential social innovation collaborators in the UK, in Peru and globally.

In 2015-2016 the Quipu team (Brown, Tucker, Court, Lerner, Sebastian Melo and Cass-Kavanagh) have given invited talks and demonstrations of Quipu at venues including many UK universities and in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Colombia, Peru and Chile. In the next twelve months we already have many invitations pending, and this stream of recognition has convinced us of the need to produce a video guide for researchers, creative practitioners and community practitioners interested in adopting similar methodologies for divergent projects. The events in Lima and Bristol would take a question and answer format, and would shape and inform the video guide. Lerner and Court will be present to film the events, and to produce the video guide which will be placed on the Quipu Project website with links from the AHRC website. This will use Quipu as a case study for how three-way collaborative learning processes can be designed and managed. It will be useful for community practitioners and NGOs looking to achieve social change through the fusion of storytelling, technology and research. This guide will prove a lasting legacy of Quipu so that the lessons we have learned in the Andes, in Lima and in Bristol can be applied elsewhere by collaborative partnerships with similar aims and objectives.

A wide spectrum of groups will benefit from this project that was born from a creative collaboration between researchers, documentary makers and local community groups.

Storytelling is a core part of the creative economy and the unique collaboration between academics, creative practitioners and technology has provided the beginning of a potential paradigm shift where storytelling moves beyond broadening audiences' horizons to becoming a catalytic force for change in the world. Our collaboration will continue to inform, challenge and shift the storytelling practices for documentary makers who wish to understand how to have a greater impact through their work.

In Peru the focus of this impact upon the creative economy will be the Lugar de la Memoria (LUM), Peru's first national memory museum. Located in a purpose-built space in Miraflores in the capital, Lima, the LUM offers a space for dialogue and discussion about Peru's recent history, as well as permanent and temporary exhibitions. The LUM hosted a panel discussion about Quipu in March 2016, and will be giving space for a Quipu exhibition in September 2016. Its curator Dr Ponciano del Pino has agreed to hosting a launch event for the finalized website in 2017, which will attract key opinion-formers within Peruvian culture and politics.

Further to this impact on the creative economy, our local partner organizations and their supporters will have the opportunity to engage with the global and national dimensions of Quipu.

1. Group of Sterilized People, Independencia in Ayacucho, central Peru. This group is the least institutionalised of all those we have worked with. They are particularly in need of resources, support and capacity building as they seek to integrate themselves within the national context of the campaign for justice and reparations.

2. AMAEF-C-GTL, Cuzco, southern Peru. This group will benefit from the focus provided by the Quipu Project, and the opportunity to use it to attract further funding and local and regional support. It will also benefit from the opportunity to embed their national networking capacity.

3. Convenio IAMAMC-AMHBA in Huancabamba, Piura, northern Peru. This group was our first case study where we worked out the principles of the Quipu Project. It is particularly important that they receive useable resources from the project, in order to reaffirm the value of their participation and to help them to use the project to further establish themselves in the national and regional pictures.

At the national level, the project will benefit Peruvian NGOs working with victims of forced sterilization, who will benefit from the institutional strengthening of our local partners, and from the greater visibility provided in the regions by our radio advert and paper pamphlets. The Lima launch will therefore strengthen their attempts to embed national cooperation and promote reparation and justice for the victims through the formation of a National Association of Sterilized Women.

This project will particularly benefit the UK academic community interested in innovative ways to collaborate and generate impact from research coming out of the social sciences and humanities. This project will not only feed the responses of our local partners into academic debates about a new model of international impact beyond the more easily-evidenced political arena, but into the realms of technology, memory and the translational role that creative practitioners can have. The team's experiences in international co-production with marginalized groups, running a successful crowdfunding model, and the difficulties we have surmounted in dealing with in-country local groups and in working with creative technologists to develop innovative solutions have wide-reaching relevance.