Dr Maria Kastrinou
Small Group Project 2027
The Politics of Grandmothers: Kinship, Memory and Resistance Across Generations
Grandmothers rarely appear in political theory. When they do, they are usually cast as marginal figures - ritual mourners, symbolic ancestors, caretakers or care-receivers - rather than as political subjects. Yet across societies grandmothers often remain when others migrate, sustain households through the labour of care, and transmit memories that link past struggles with present political life. This project asks what becomes visible when grandmothers are placed at the centre of political analysis.
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Biography
Maria Kastrinou is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London. Her work is rooted in ethnographic research in Syria and the occupied Golan Heights, exploring how people sustain kinship, memory and social life across conflict, statelessness and occupation. She is interested in how political life is carried through relationships and across boundaries: between generations, life and death, and borders. Her project, The Politics of Grandmothers, asks what grandmothers can teach us about care, memory and resistance in violent times, in the Middle East and the UK. She is the author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (IB Tauris 2016).
Biographical details correct as of 13.09.26