Scholars Jennifer Clary-Lemon and David M. Grant posit that material rhetorics,  in challenging the Western idea that the human is the ultimate source of knowledge, brings into conversation the agency of matter - from animals, to things often considered inanimate, to forces like the weather - and unseating Western norms that separate the body from the mind, culture from nature, and logic from emotion.

Material Rhetoric's Challenge to Centering Western Logic

Material Rhetorics challenges the assumptions that:
- humans are the most important agent of knowledge
- Western logic that focuses on human senses and cognition is the ultimate source and arbiter of knowledge
- nonhuman things can be reliably understood and observed by humans

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Material Rhetorics is a concept based on the idea that some of the more modern assumptions of rhetorics should be challenged and moved beyond. 

Material Rhetorics

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Assumptions Material Rhetorics Challenges

Price uses Jay Dolmage's definition of rhetoric where rhetoric is defined as the study of how power is affirmed, built, and reaffirmed through communication. 

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