Mikulan, Petra

Dr. Petra Mikulan is a South Slav immigrant settler whose research examines how time organizes education, in other words, how institutions govern through pace, sequence, developmental expectations, deadlines, waiting, interruption, repetition, and imagined futures, and how these temporal arrangements shape questions of ethics, equity, knowledge, and educational possibility. Across her work, she has developed a research program concerned with the politics and ethics of educational time, bringing together philosophy of education, educational theory, feminist and critical race scholarship, decolonial and postcolonial thought, disability and neurodiversity studies, and emerging work in education policy and law.

Her current research develops this work through the concept of 'temporal governance'. She is particularly interested in how educational policies and institutions distribute time unevenly. This research increasingly focuses on the temporal effects of technological acceleration, climate disruption, disability and educational transitions, accountability regimes, and education law and policy. She examines temporal organization itself as a form of governance with material, ethical, and political consequences.

Dr. Petra Mikulan completed SSHRC- and Killam-funded postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia, where she examined developments in neuroscience and their implications for educational theory and policy. That work extended her earlier research on developmentalism and the ways educational systems convert contingent forms of human difference into normative sequences of development, progress, and achievement. Her subsequent scholarship has examined how these assumptions intersect with colonial modernity, racialization, trauma, environmental crisis, and neurodiversity.

A related strand of her research asks how education might be thought beyond inherited narratives of progress and predetermined futures. Her work on colonialism and temporality critiques education's recurrent promise that historical violence can be overcome through future progress while the temporal structures that reproduce that violence remain intact. She is interested instead in forms of educational ethics capable of responding across multiple and sometimes incompatible temporal scales: individual and institutional, ecological and technological, historical and intergenerational.

Her broader theoretical work engages speculative, posthumanist, and postfoundational approaches to education. Here she examines a recurring problem within critical theory: how attempts to move beyond foundational categories can themselves generate new foundations, scales, or universalizing frameworks. This concern informs her work on refusal, indeterminacy, contingency, and educational futures, including her books and collaborative scholarship on time, refusal, and unschooling.

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH FUNDING AND FELLOWSHIPS

2025–2027. Principal Investigator. 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.
2018–2020. SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. The Problematics of Life Sciences in Education Policy. CAD $141,000.
2018–2020. Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. The Problematics of Life Sciences in Education Policy. CAD $24,000 (pro-rated while held concurrently with SSHRC fellowship).
2015–2017. SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship. Pedagogy in Precarious Times. CAD $40,000.
2013–2017. Simon Fraser University Graduate Fellowships. CAD $34,500.

A selection of recent PUBLICATIONS

Books

Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (2023). Time and education: Time pedagogy against oppression. Bloomsbury.
Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (Eds.). (2026). Unschooled Futures; Pluriversal Speculations. Bloomsbury.
Mikulan, P., & Zembylas, M. (Eds.). (2024). Working with theories of refusal and decolonization in higher education. Routledge.

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.
Mikulan, P., & Rudder, A. (2020). Posthumanist perspectives on racialized life and human difference pedagogy. Educational Theory, 69(5), 615-629.

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.

Upcoming Courses

This instructor is currently not teaching any courses.

Faculty of Education

Petra Mikulan