About
Research Interests
Individual research Interests
Bio
Dr. Mikulan is a South Slav immigrant settler whose research addresses transdisciplinary intersections between ideas of time, vitalism and life in the Anthropocene, as they pertain to educational ethics, feminist race theory, decoloniality, trauma, and neurodiversity. She completed SSHRC, and Killam funded postdoctoral fellowship focused on the latest research in neuroscience as it pertains to educational policy. Her research critically examines assumptions about time in education and their impact on learning theories, ethics, equity, and the broader purpose of education. Her work critically examines the regimented nature of curricula, introducing indeterminacies and contingencies to challenge existing systems of oppression. In exploring the intersection of time, colonialism, and ethics, Dr. Mikulan also challenges education’s messianic approach to time, revealing its implications for perpetuating historical violence and maintaining atemporal ethics in higher education. Her critical analysis questions the repetitive rehearsal of white modernity, emphasizing the urgent need for a transformative understanding of temporal scales to foster an environmental, transgenerational, ethical, and inclusive educational environment. Her research encompasses a broader exploration of speculative, foundational and postfoundational binaries and asks how researchers might engage postfoundational approaches in ways that refuse the kinds of scalar thinking that reifies and recentres them as new foundations.
Dr. Mikulan’s extensive academic journey includes an M.Phil. in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Granada and Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis – Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities, as well as a B.A. Hons. with a double major in Sociology and Educational Studies from the University of Ljubljana.
Research and Education
Research Projects
2025–2027. Principal Investigator (with Daniel Gallardo as co-applicant). Embedding Climate Trauma-Informed Pedagogy in Teacher Education Courses through a Novel Approach of Drag-Pedagogy. UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, Small Innovation Fund. CAD $42,000.
The problematic of life in education: Theorizing the implications of the recent advancements in life sciences for education policy. (Completed)
2018 – 2021
Grantors: (1) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) & (2) Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (UBC)
Role: Postdoctoral Researcher, with Dr. Taylor Webb, (Principal Investigator)
Selected Publications
Books:
Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (Eds.). (2026). Unschooled Futures; Pluriversal Speculations. Bloomsbury.
Co-author (with Nathalie Sinclair) of Time and Education; Time Pedagogy Against Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) Introduction
Co-editor (with Michalinos Zembylas) of Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education. (Routledge, 2024)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:
Mikulan, P., & Zembylas, M. (2026). Affective eugenics: education, political polarization, and the affective sorting of futurity. Theory, Culture & Society.
Mikulan, P. (2026). The biotech womb and the necropolitics of purity: social reproduction, racial capitalism, and the control of futurity in times of hosted life. Postdigital Science and Education.
Mikulan, P., & Wallin, J. (2025). Toward a brutalist turn in education. Ecokritike 2(1), 8-30.
Mikulan, P., & Zembylas, M. (2024). Witnessing transgenerational trauma in teacher education: Decoloniality of time, rupture of developmentalism, and settler resistance. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-19.
Webb, P. T., & Mikulan, P. (2023). Escape education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(12), 1316-1321.
Mikulan, P. (2022). An ethics of refusal: A speculative pragmatic challenge to systemic racism in education. Educational Theory, 72(1).
Webb, P. T., Piotrowski, M., & Mikulan, P. (2022). Intraview: Contagious education. In G. Klumbytė & C. Draude (Eds.), Special issue: New materialist informatics. Matter.
Book Chapters:
Mikulan, P. (2026, forthcoming). Preface: Thinking where prediction breaks. In Radman, A. Ecologies of architecture 2.0: Essays on Quasicausality. Edinburgh University Press.
Mikulan, P. (2026, forthcoming). Xenostalgia and the politics of proximity in a horizonless world. In Franklin-Phipps, A. & Varga, B. (Eds.) Accumulating Proximities. Routledge.
Mikulan, P. (2026, in press). Energosentimentalism: Climate injustice and relational aesthetics. In A. Sezenbarie & S. Tolbert (Eds.), Handbook of climate change research in transdisciplinary education. Springer.
Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (2026). Introduction: In the pluriverse, “the moon breeds like a rabbit” and she is laughing. In P. Mikulan & N. Sinclair (Eds.), Unschooled futures: Pluriversal speculations. Bloomsbury.
Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (2026). Educational un/commoning in the face of climate injustice. In P. Mikulan & N. Sinclair (Eds.), Unschooled futures: Pluriversal speculations. Bloomsbury
Mikulan, P. (2026). The biopolitical brain of the “plastic learner”. In Tröhler, D. and Myrebøe, S. (Ed.). Handbook on Education History, Philosophy and Theory. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK.
Mikulan, P. (2025). Decolonizing a linear conception of time in teacher education: Disrupting developmental paradigms through an ethics of care. In A. Davies (Ed.), Disrupting Developmentalism in Canadian Early Years Education: Centering Marginalized Knowledges. Canadian Scholars Press.
Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (2024). Coloniality of time: Defacing unsustainable temporal paradigms in educational research and practice. In D. R. Cole, R. Mehri Mirzaei, & A. Gui Ying (Eds.), Educational research and the question(s) of time. Springer.
Mikulan, P. (2024). Refusing archives of possibility: A decolonial praxis of temporalizing ethics. In P. Mikulan & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Working with theories of refusal and decolonization in higher education. Routledge.
Mikulan, P., & Zembylas, M. (2024). Introduction: Refusing the colonial university. In P. Mikulan & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Working with theories of refusal and decolonization in higher education. Routledge.
Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (2023). Inquiry as if sketch. In A. Y. Jackson & L. A. Mazzei (Eds.), Post-foundational approaches to inquiry. Routledge.
Mikulan, P., & Wallin, J. (2022). Terminal protagonism: Negation and education in the Anthropocene. In J. Jagodzinski & J. Beier (Eds.), Ahuman pedagogy: Multidisciplinary perspectives for education in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan.
Webb, P. T., & Mikulan, P. (2022). Decolonizing racial bioinformatics: Governing education in contagion and dehiscence. In M. A. Peters, P. Jandrić, & S. Hayes (Eds.), Bioinformational philosophy and postdigital knowledge ecologies. Springer.
Editorial Work:
Book Review Editor, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2019-
EDST Activity
Courses taught
Additional
Scholarships and Fellowships (competitive)
2018-2020 SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Canada.
2018-2020 Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, University of British Columbia. . $24,000 (pro-rated due to holding concurrent postdoctoral fellowships).
2015-2017 SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship, Simon Fraser University.
2013-2017 SFU Graduate Fellowship, Simon Fraser University.
2015 President’s PhD Scholarship, Simon Fraser University.
2015 Dr. M. Sheila O’Connell Graduate Publication Scholarship, Simon Fraser University.
2014 Dr. M. Sheila O’Connell Graduate Scholarship in Children’s Literature, Simon Fraser University.
2009-2010 Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, University of Granada, Spain.
1997-2009 Zois Scholarship for Gifted Students, Slovenia.