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

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. 

Dolmage's Definition of Rhetoric

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

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Price outlines the following as the scholarship and ways of knowing Price has drawn from in theorizing Crip Spacetime:
- Critical Disability Studies
- Crip-of-Color Critique
- Material Rhetorics

Scholarship where Crip Spacetime is Situated

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

Crip Spacetime

Critical Disability Studies has the word critical in the title to tie it to other disciplines in critical studies. Based on frameworks of critical studies, critical disability studies looks at disability as a construct or category created by current political and social systems to uphold existing power relations and systems. Because of this Critical Disability Studies is more interested with questions about the larger system that labels some bodies as disabled while also being grounded in the importance of embodiment, lived experience, and relationships with those outside of the academy. 

Critical Disability Studies

Crip-of-Color Critique was coined by Jina Kim and Sami Schalk as a concept located at the nexus of feminist of color, queer of color, and disability studies theories. Crip-of-Color Critique is the idea that ableism is not just entwined with but is casually related to other axes of oppression including racism, classism, and sexism, and that there are counter-stories and counter-knowledges that are pushed back against ableism that are practiced and come from disabled, queer, low-income Black and brown communities.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After