Services


Lectures and Workshops

Carla Rice offers lectures and workshops to educators, health care providers, and general audiences. Most of the following workshops can be presented to accommodate time slots varying from 1 hour to 1 day. Her usual fee for a workshop is $1200/day plus travel expenses. Feel free to contact her to discuss the needs and interests of your organization.

Topics on which Dr. Rice offers lectures and workshops include:
  • Popular culture and diverse women’s body image problems
  • Women’s body image problems across the life span, including pivotal periods of puberty, pregnancy, and menopause
  • Body image as an equity issue: Intervening in body image problems in school settings
  • Consequences for children of anti-fat messages at school
  • Harassment and harmful body practices in middle and high school girls
  • Body image, identity, disability, and difference
  • Feminist ways of working with body image issues
  • Relational and narrative approaches to working with body image and eating problems
  • Working with issues of body diversity and equity in health and social service settings 

A complete list of Dr. Rice’s presentations can be found in her list of appearances and in her CV. Dr. Rice is interested in working with your group to develop new workshop topics within her general areas of expertise that are tailored to your group's specific needs.


Consulting Services

Dr. Rice is available to consult with therapists, health and social service providers, educators, and organizations about:

  • Is there an obesity epidemic in Canada? Decoding the evidence
  • Helping without harming children and youth: Navigating conflicting messages about eating and weight
  • Detection of body image, food, weight, and eating problems within client and school populations
  • Primary prevention of eating problems and promotion of health body image in diverse groups
  • Eating disorder treatment: Biomedical, relational, and narrative approaches
  • Creative ways of working with issues of body image, identity, and difference
  • Enhancing organizational responses to body image problems and eating disorders
  • Integrating body diversity and equity policies and practices in health and social service settings
Consultation is available either on a one-time or on-going basis, by appointment. Current fees for consultation are 125/hour.


Counselling Services

Dr. Rice is not accepting new counseling clients at this time.


Sample Workshops


Sample #1: Educational Workshop

EmBodying Equity: Body Image as an Equity Issue in School Settings

Introduction of Workshop Goals, Objectives, and Agenda   

Part 1: Current Trends                        
Childhood Obesity & Adolescent Eating Problems

In this portion of the workshop, we explore current cultural trends in body image and eating problems among children and adolescents. It may include formal presentation and discussion of the following topics:
  • How systems create unfitness: Consequences of anti-fat messages for kids at school
  • Harassment and harmful body practices in school settings
    •
Part 2: Curricular and Extra-curricular Interventions

In part two of the workshop, we examine curricular and extra curricular interventions found to be effective in promoting healthy body image within school settings. Topics include:
  • Ethics & equity in using popular media images             
  • Pedagogical strategies & reflective practice
  • Changing our school environments               
  • Wrap-up and evaluation
    •
I often work with Vanessa Russell and June Larkin, both respected and experienced educators, in conducting research and workshops on body image issues in schools.


Sample #2: Body Image, Identity and Difference Workshop

Exploring our Experiences of Appearance and Difference

In our society, a great deal of importance is placed on our appearance and physical abilities. How the culture values or devalues physical features, sizes, and capacities has a significant impact on our body images and identities. In this workshop, we explore how body and self-images are created, and how perceptions of appearance and difference are shaped in people’s everyday interactions. The workshop is intended to provide a place for your staff to expand their knowledge in working with issues of body diversity and equity so that they can support people who may be confronting difficult situations.

Session Agenda, Goals and Objectives

Part 1: How body and self-images are created

We begin by exploring the relationship of body image to self image. We define the concept of body image, identify factors shaping body image, and address why our body images have become an important part of our identities in contemporary society. This is done through didactic presentation and experiential exercises, including the following:
  • Experiential Exercise and Discussion: Telling our stories using small significant objects
  • Presentation and Experiential Exercise: Writing exercise on body image and self-esteem
  • Discussion: How can you apply this to your work settings?

Part 2: How body image is significant to understanding ourselves, our identities, and our sense of life possibilities

In part 2 of the workshop, we explore how others and our own perceptions of our bodies can shape our sense of self and potential. We begin by acknowledging the power of dominant images and messages. Yet we also highlight the creative capacities of ordinary people to demonstrate through their art-making a different view of difference. We develop these themes through presentation, arts-based exercises, and discussion of experiential activities that can be done with diverse groups, including:
  • Experiential Exercise: “Me Inside and Out”
  • Presentation and Discussion: Creative interventions with diverse groups
  • Evaluation
I often work with Lorna Renooy, a respected educator with 20 years experience training providers across Canada, the US, and Britain in working with facial and physical differences. I also have worked with Fran Odette and Hilde Zitzelsberger, both experienced researchers and practitioners in the area of disability, to facilitate workshops on body image, identity, and difference.


Sample #3: Health and Social Service Providers Workshop

Appearance and Difference in Social Interactions

Session Goals and Objectives

Part 1: Living with Differences

We begin by exploring commonplace stereotypes related to our physical differences, including size, colour, disability, facial or physical difference, gender, sexuality, poverty, and others.  We uncover the adverse effects of negative attitudes toward difference in people’s lives and begin to look at the implications of this information for health providers and social service workers. Themes explored through presentation, discussion, and small group exercises include the following:
  • Presentation: How perceptions of appearance and difference shape our interactions
  • Exercise and discussion: Small Group Work with Scenarios

Part 2: Working Across Differences

In part 2 of the workshop, we explore implications of differences in people’s lives and people’s creative responses to discrimination and marginalization. We introduce the concept of “agency”, provide examples of this idea, and apply it to diverse client scenarios. We conclude with an exploration of how workshop participants might apply this knowledge to their workplace.
  • Presentation: Sharing and developing our knowledge in working with body diversity and equity issues
  • Presentation: Introduction to Narrative Methods
  • Exercise: Discovering Agency: Our intentions and the actions we take
  • Discussion: How can you apply this in your workplace?


Sample #4: Counselling Methods Workshop

Working with Body Image, Food, and Weight Issues

In this session, I offer an overview of models used to understand body image, eating, and weight problems. I introduce how I work with these issues, by combining feminist relational and narrative methods. This unique approach is based on 20 years experience of counselling women with diverse identities and life histories in dealing with problems associated with embodiment. Over past 7 years, I have done extensive training in narrative therapy, which I also share in this workshop.

Introductions  and Agenda

Part I: Overview of Approaches

I introduce 4 major models used to explain eating and body image problems. As we look at these frameworks, I ask the group to attend to critical questions about how body image problems understood in each approach. Questions include the location of the problem according to each approach (biology, psyche, society), who is responsible for solutions (individuals, health care providers, health institutions, families, communities, broader society) who benefits from each framework, as well as some positive and negative effects of each framework. 
  • Presentation: Major models used to understand eating and body image problems
  • Discussion: When is each model useful? What are its limitations?

Part II. Applying a Relational Approach

In part 2 of this workshop I explore body image and eating problems as problems of connection: with one’s body, physical needs, memories, emotions, and with others. This approach sees bingeing, purging, starving, and cutting as means of coping with intolerable bodily states associated with trauma—including sexual abuse and body-based harassment. It interprets practices as habit forming ways of disconnecting from the body as the site of violation, from one’s embodied emotions, and from others.
  • Presentation: What roles do context and relationship play in the formation of body image and its struggles?
  • Presentation and discussion: Body image across the life span
  • Presentation: Feminist relational methods
  • Exercise: Applying a relational approach

Part III. Incorporating a Narrative Approach

In this section of the workshop, I introduce a narrative approach to working with body image and eating problems. Drawing from postmodern theory, narrative therapy understands people’s selves as created through social relations and through cultural images and language. I describe how, in my own clinical practice, I interweave together narrative with feminist relational methods.
  • Introduction and overview of narrative methods
  • Exploring operations and effects of problems in people's lives
  • Appreciating agency and creating alternative identities
  • Wrap Up and Evaluation