Abstract
This paper develops a posthuman theory of perception through multispecies encounters with dust, low vision, and microscopy. Drawing on feminist new materialism, particularly Karen Barad's concepts of intra-action and diffraction and Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, alongside multispecies ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Melbourne kindergarten, the article argues that perception is not a stable human capacity located within the body. Rather, seeing emerges relationally through ongoing entanglements among bodies, technologies, atmospheres, light, and matter.Building from earlier work on child-earth relations and dust pedagogies, the paper advances a distinct theoretical intervention centred on perception and sensory life. Rather than approaching low vision through deficit-based frameworks, partial vision is positioned as an epistemological and methodological opening that reveals the constitutive incompleteness of all seeing. Low vision becomes a way of unsettling assumptions of perceptual mastery, objectivity, and sensory autonomy, while foregrounding perception as embodied, situated, and materially mediated.
The paper further theorises microscopes not as instruments that simply extend human sight, but as co-perceptual participants that actively shape what becomes visible. Through children's collective encounters with dust under magnification, perception emerges as social, speculative, and more-than-human. Dust transforms from overlooked residue into textured microworlds that invite microbial imaginaries, relational thinking, and shared acts of world-making.
Situating these encounters within posthumanities, disability studies, sensory studies, and feminist new materialist scholarship, the article reconceptualises perception as a distributed, ethical, and technologically mediated event rather than a representational act of a sovereign observer. Ultimately, it argues that perception has always been collective, partial, and multispecies: we have never seen alone.
