The Politics of Grandmothers: Kinship, Memory and Resistance Across Generations

What do grandmothers tell us about protest and kinship? This project investigates what grandmothers can reveal about the relationship between kinship and political life. Grandmothers occupy a distinctive generational position within kinship systems, linking memory, care and political life across generations while mediating relations between ancestors, parents and children. The first empirical context draws on Kastrinou's ethnographic research in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, where stateless Syrian Druze communities have lived under Israeli occupation since 1967. Life history interviews with women from these communities show how grandmothers anchor households, sustain everyday forms of resistance and transmit memories of displacement and political struggle across militarised borders. Druze cosmology further complicates conventional understandings of kinship through narratives of reincarnation that link relations between the living and the dead, as well as across often violent borders. The second context examines the growing political visibility of older women in contemporary protest movements in the United Kingdom, including the participation and arrest of grandmothers in recent pro-Palestinian and climate-change demonstrations. Through interviews with activist grandmothers, the project will explore how generational experience and life histories shape political engagement later in life. Together these contexts allow the project to examine how grandmotherhood operates as a generational form of political agency across different political landscapes.

People

	Name	Telephone	Email	Office
	Dr Maria Kastrinou Senior Lecturer in Anthropology T: +44 (0)1895 265059 E: maria.kastrinou@brunel.ac.uk	+44 (0)1895 265059	maria.kastrinou@brunel.ac.uk	Marie Jahoda 219