Elena Gagovska, Author at Public Seminar

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Rethinking Charlottesville in Light of Unite the Right II

Shut down the Alt-Right, don’t debate it.

October 15, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

More than a year after Charlottesville, some of the alt-right’s stances -- in one form or another -- have entered into the mainstream conservative platform. As this has happened I have become more and more convinced that debating these extremists is not the solution. In fact, I argued for not ...

Rethinking Charlottesville in Light of Unite the Right II

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A Call for International Solidarity

On the fight for immigrant and refugee justice

August 16, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

About a month and a half ago I applied for an American tourist visa at the U.S. embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, because I plan on visiting my boyfriend there during fall break. Admittedly, I felt a little resentful of the process. Security guards with guns they weren’t going to use ...

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Two Europes, Not Quite the Same

Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in Eastern Europe

April 3, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Yugoslavia was in a state of bloody mayhem. Bullets whistled back and forth across the streets from the weapons of invisible shooters, snipers. But as the shells vied to wipe out passersby, reduce thousand-year-old bridges to dust, and the formerly ‘new’ philosophers vied to shame us, going out of their ...

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A Conversation We Must Not Stop Having

The #MeToo movement

February 5, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

I tried to speak out. I told our homeroom teacher and she yelled at the boys in our class in front of the girls, telling them that this was wrong. But no real disciplinary measures were taken. Most of the boys (at least in my class) engaged in non-consensual touching, ...

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Film review: Champ of the Camp

The first ever feature-length documentary filmed in the UAE’s controversial labor camps

January 1, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Mahmoud Kaabour’s film Champ of the Camp (2014) opens with the song by a South Asian man set against the backdrop of a modernistic building covered in glass windows. The song is called “Long Separation” and the setting is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Such juxtaposition runs throughout the movie: the poor ...

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The Political Landscape Post Charlottesville

Where Should Students and Academics Stand?

September 16, 2017 • by Elena Gagovska

I had thought that the scariest sight that weekend would be the images of the “Unite the Right” rally. Men can be scary enough on their own. Men with violent ideologies are simply terrifying. The white supremacist rally was toxically masculine, looked utterly fascist and sounded like a historical period ...

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When Fascists Break into Parliament

A Reflection on the Crisis in Skopje

May 19, 2017 • by Elena Gagovska

When fascists break into your country’s parliament you feel like you’ve been talking about right-wing populism in academic settings for far too long. You feel like you’ve been talking about the causes and the cures of something just getting underway in the West, all while this is the only kind of ...