Purple Code – With Eliana Quiroz

Abstract

This conversation with Eliana Quiroz, digital rights activist and author from Bolivia and temporary fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, delves into the many implications of digital media for women. Eliana has co-founded the Bolivian digital rights collective https://internetbolivia.org/ and has fought for decades to improve digital rights in Bolivia. As she explains, this entails to maneuver a highly polarized political context, and to maintain a stubborn persistency. She has engaged in fostering free software, in drafting and lobbying a data protection bill, and to support self-defense strategies against online violence directed towards women and indigenous communities. She furthermore elaborates on how being a woman in male dominated tech and political communities affects her work – a situation to which Sana, Bianca, and Lena can relate very well, as becomes clear in the conversation.