Ilona Grabmaier

Ilona Grabmaier is a Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna. She completed her PhD in August 2023 with a dissertation titled 'Stayed at home. (Re)Configurations of Care in Rural Ukraine'.

Her research focuses on the (re)production of social (in)equality and security at the intersection of politics, gender relations, care practices, morality and post-socialist transformation. She examines how care networks reconfigure in contexts of female labor migration, particularly investigating how moral judgments about deservingness determine access to care resources in rural Ukrainian communities.

Her 2024 publication analyzes gendered constructions of deservingness in rural Ukraine, revealing how normative notions of reciprocity, kinship, gender, and life course determine whether individuals receive support. The research demonstrates how elderly women gain power within communities by negotiating boundaries between kinship obligations and state responsibilities.

As part of the department's research group, she contributes to the 'Reconfiguring Care (Ukraine)' project which investigates how the absence of women due to outmigration affects social, economic and political circumstances for men, children and senior citizens who remain.