Petra Mikulan
Research Area
About
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.