Mikulan, Petra

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.

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)

Books:

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)

Selected Recent Articles:

Mikulan, P. (2022). An Ethics of Refusal: A Speculative Pragmatic Challenge to Systemic Racism in Education. Educational Theory, 72(1).

Webb, P. T. & Mikulan, P. (2021). Escape education. Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Mikulan, P. and Rudder, A. (2020). Posthumanist Perspectives on Racialized Life and Human Difference      Pedagogy. Educational Theory, 69(5), 615-629.

Mikulan P. and Sinclair, N. (2019). Stratigraphy as a method for studying the different modes of existence arising in the mathematical classroom. ZDM Mathematics Education, 51(2), 239-249.

Mikulan, P. and Sinclair, N. (2017). Thinking mathematics pedagogy stratigraphically in the              Anthropocene. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal 32, 1-13.

Mikulan, P. (2014). Beyond a single world: Pedagogy and relating in difference. Philosophical Inquiry in      Education: The Journal of the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society, 22(1), 100-107.

Selected Recent Chapters:

Mikulan, P. (2024). Refusing Archives of Possibility; A Decolonial Praxis of Temporalizing Ethics. In                 Mikulan P., and Zembylas, M. (Eds.), Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education. Routledge Press.

Mikulan, P. and Zembylas, M. (2024). Introduction; Refusing the Colonial University. In Mikulan P., and       Zembylas, M. (Eds.), Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education. Routledge Press.

Mikulan, P. and Sinclair, N. (2023). Inquiry As If Sketch. In Jackson, A.Y. and Mazzei, L.A. (Eds.), Post-            Foundational Approaches to Inquiry. Routledge Press.

Mikulan, P. and Wallin, J. (2022). Terminal Protagonism: Negation and Education in the Anthropocene. In jagodzinski, j. and Beier, J. (Eds.), Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. (Authors listed alphabetically).

Webb, P.T. and 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.

Mikulan, P. (2018). Étienne Souriau and educational literacy research as an instaurative event. In C. Kuby, K. Spector, J. J. Thiel and L. Vasudevan (Eds.), Posthumanism and Literacy Education (pp. 95-107),          New York, NY: Routledge.

Editorial Work:

Book Review Editor, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2019-

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.