Evelina Baczewska

Sociology, MA

Disability Rights Activist, Feminist Sociologist & Self-described ‘space invader’

As a space invader, I relish in exposing the socio-spatial and political boundaries that govern bodies occupying spaces that don’t meet somatic norms. With wheelchairs, walkers, we invade space unveiling its limits. Invading space is a useful tactic that disrupts dominant assumptions of access and entry.

Ev Baczewska

As a woman with a physical disability, my work is focused on foregrounding the voices and lived experiences of people living with disabilities as a way of illuminating and eliminating barriers. Being a feminist sociologist, my work analyzes the ways in which social markers of differencerace–race, class, gender, (dis)ability, etc., inform people’s unique standpoints, and how such identity categories coalesce producing distinct experiences of oppression and privilege.

In a world that largely privileges the voices, movements, places, spaces, paths, and representations already forged by those who meet gender and other embodied norms, my advocacy is informed by those that do not ascribe to normative ways of being–heteronormative, ableist, and patriarchal tendencies. 

Not shying away from exposing institutional barriers and limits, my experience demonstrates the continued necessity of making everyday life accessible. I rely on my lived accounts of navigating space (i.e., the workforce, places of higher education, and other social institutions) to speak truth to power by concretely illustrating that my presence in such spaces continues to be contested.

Feminist Limns: An Embodied Archive of Intersectional Forms of Access is a digital collection of my lived experience. An archive of a space invader: not expected but showing up anyway. My entry, like an invasion is never discreet – it is visual and auditory: a spectacle animated by the sounds of the whirling and twirling of wheels, the shuffling of chairs, the sometimes climbing of stairs and avoidance of stares, the switching of seats, the rearrangement of desks, and the struggle of opening doors. An archive of refusal and acceptance, and an archive of refusal of acceptance.

With vulnerability & shared refusal,

Ev XO