Erika Dvorak

Erika, a fat white woman with brown hair and hazel eyes smiles brightly with the trunk of a large eucalyptus tree behind her. She is wearing orange, pink, and green floral dungarees and holding a pink, white, and yellow floral bouquet wrapped in brown paper. Her hair is tied in a low messy ponytail that drapes over her right shoulder.

Graduate Student

she/her
Office Hours
Tuesdays 2pm-4pm, and by appointment over zoom

Erika's main research focuses include disability, eugenics, intersectional feminism, critical fatness studies, critical race theory, and marxist critique. Her dissertation is a mixed-methods project concerning the eugenicist nature of covid public policy, and the ongoing efforts of disabled people and allies to continue taking covid precautions despite public health messaging that aims to "move on" from the ongoing pandemic and mass disabling event.

Erika's qualifying paper traced logics of whiteness through interviews with fat white women, building off of Sabrina Strings's 2019 book Fearing the Black Body, which argues that antifatness is rooted in antiblackness. 

As a disabled fat woman who has been deeply impacted by the ongoing covid 19 pandemic, Erika's relationship to sociology and to social science more broadly is influenced by her lived experience in a multiply marginalized body, as well as a white body with tremendous privilege. 

Education and Degree(s)
  • M.A. Sociology, University of California, Davis
  • B.A. Sociology, Washington State University