This session of Qualifie working group features a presentation by Samuel Ritholtz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, University of Oxford
Drawing on his DPhil research and his monograph in progress, Waging Stigma: Anti-LGBT Violence during the Colombian Civil War, Dr. Samuel Ritholtz will reflect on the practical and ethical realities of fieldwork with violence-affected communities. The book project examines the dynamics of collective violence against LGBTQ+ people during the Colombian internal armed conflict and relates these dynamics to broader processes of social transformation during war. Researching violence of this kind carries demands that reach well beyond the analysis itself. In this talk, the author will turn to the everyday challenges of handling sensitive data in the field, from safeguarding recordings and navigating border crossings to weighing legal and ethical obligations, and offer candid insights into what a duty of care means in practice.
Speaker:
Samuel Ritholtz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, University of Oxford. His research centres on marginalised social groups in studies of contentious politics, predominantly conflict, with a particular interest in the politics of gender and sexuality. He is the co-author, with Rebecca Buxton, of The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge (University of California Press, 2026), which draws on the personal narratives of LGBTIQ refugees to examine the shortcomings of the international protection regime and what justice for queer and trans displaced people could look like. He earned his DPhil from the Refugee Studies Centre in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. From 2022 to 2024, he was a Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute.
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