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We meet at Professor Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky's office at the Institute for Sociology in the LMU, Munich. Our conversation begins with the issue of intellectual motherhood; over the course of almost two hours, it ranges from the personal to the political, switching from philosophy and ethics to everyday topics such as childcare and tax distribution within the family.Professor Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky, a German-Argentine sociologist, is a leading researcher in her field. She is also the co-spokeswoman of ForGenderCare, an interdisciplinary research network of 11 Bavarian research institutions investigating theoretical and empirical connections between care and gender. She is an elected board member of the German Sociological Association (DGS), and served as an elected board member of the German Association for Gender Studies between 2010 and 2014. Her key research topics are care and gender, biopolitics, cultural studies, and science-academia and gender (Villa, 2014(Villa, , 2017a. Her recent work is focusing on the German care crisis (Villa, 2017b).On first reading Villa Braslavsky's academic résumé, I was immediately struck by the fact that it references the births of her son and daughter. For me, this was an eye-opening feminist statement. Affirming the importance and significance of motherhood in a usually staid document was a revelation. For one thing, it demonstrates that traditional and rigid structures can be changed; it also highlights that a reader of this résumé can be moved by this inclusion, which puts front and centre the understanding that caring is a form of work and cannot be overlooked.Inbar Livnat How did your work contribute to the understanding of care?Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky Care is a fundamental aspect of human life. It is a biosocial activity and need, thus it is of existential dimension at the individual and social level. No person, and no society can survive without care. The question is, how do we as societies and as individuals organize care? This is a paramount question, and there is much excellent research already out there.My perspective is to understand how our contemporary condition re-enforces autonomy exclusively as a social and political value, while devaluing care and vulnerability. This is especially intriguing, since a main driver in emancipatory politics (such as feminist movements) is the fight for autonomy. While

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