Elena Čavlin holds a degree in Political Science and is a Master’s student in the Political Institutions, Public Administration and Public Sector programme at the Faculty of Political Sciences. Her professional and activist work focuses on human rights, political participation, social justice, and youth policy. Through her involvement with organisations and initiatives such as CPE, NKD, KOMS, Popular Democracy, Klara and Rosa, and the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, she has worked on peer education, political participation, labour and women’s rights, and issues of socio-economic inequality.
She is particularly committed to working with young people and strengthening democratic culture at both national and local levels, especially in her hometown of Subotica. Growing up in a multiethnic city shaped her understanding of democracy, which she sees not as an abstract political concept but as an everyday practice of dialogue, negotiation, and living with diversity.
As an author and researcher, she explores issues that connect political decision-making with citizens’ everyday lives. She is particularly interested in public budgets and the political priorities they reveal: how much is invested in public health and education, what working conditions look like, what constitutes a wage that allows people to live with dignity, and who actually has access to society’s resources. She also explores political behaviour, including how people make political decisions, what shapes their views, and what motivates them to support particular political options.
Through her experience in civil society, she has worked extensively on youth participation, particularly the involvement of young people at the local level, labour practices, and the broader position of young people in society. Her work seeks to connect issues that are often treated separately, including public policy, economic and social inequality, labour rights, education, public health, and political participation.
She approaches these issues from a feminist perspective, examining how political decisions and social systems affect different groups in different ways, how existing inequalities are reproduced, and whose needs remain invisible in public policy-making processes.