Carla Rice

Professor, FRHD & Tier 1 CRC in Feminist Studies and Social Practice
Department of Family Relations & Applied Nutrition
Email: 
carlar@uoguelph.ca
Phone number: 
519-824-4120 x54942
Office: 
103 Blackwood Hall
Website links: 
Carla Rice's Website

Research interests: social justice, feminist studies, intersectionality, decolonizing, arts-based research, disability arts, fat studies, embodiment, digital storytelling

Accepting Graduate Students: Fall 2023

My research is almost entirely community oriented and engaged, reflecting my passions for bringing diverse groups together and creating welcoming spaces and meaningful relationships that foster personal and social change.

In my community-engaged scholarship I strive not only to engage community but further, to create community with previously dis-enfranchised and dis-placed individuals. These include members of groups historically excluded from community, such as people with physical and mental disabilities and differences who have been disappeared from communal life by institutional warehousing, forced sterilization, and other confining/ eliminating practices, and urban Indigenous peoples, many of whom have been alienated from traditional territories, cultures, and reserve communities through state practices of residential schooling, forced assimilation and forced "enfranchisement".

In the past 10 years, I have founded Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice and the Revisioning Differences Media Arts Laboratory (REDLAB), a cutting-edge research creation centre and a state-of-the-art media-lab, which seek to explore the efficacy and power of creative methods to advance social well-being, equity, and justice in Canada and beyond.

Thus, at its core, my research is centrally about community, about theorizing the significance of community, and about studying innovative ways of building community.

In this, I emphasize arts-informed participatory research methods and knowledge mobilization as potentially efficacious ways of engaging, creating, and extending community to advance personal and institutional transformation and social justice.

Ph.D. in Women's Studies, York University, 2004

M.Ed. in Applied Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1993

  • SSHRC Tier 1 CRC in Feminist Studies and Social Practice, 2021
  • Lieutenant Governor's Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation for Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, 2020
  • Outstanding International Researcher Prize, British Psychological Society Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section, 2019
  • Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, 2017

Transformational Change Methodologies Lab

  • September 2022 – April 2023
  • September 2021 – April 2022
  • September 2020 – April 2021

In this course, we examine various interdisciplinary entanglements between creative accessible research methods and social justice (including but not limited to critical, community-oriented, and feminist research practices), exploring the challenges, possibilities, and tensions that define our academic fields and range of social practices.

The course foregrounds four critical spheres in contemporary qualitative research methodologies and accessibility practices: 1) decolonizing and Indigenous research; 2) feminist intersectionality research; 3) post-qualitative inquiry; and 4) arts-based /creative research.

Along the lines of a "Master Class," the course engage with students' research interests in conjunction with readings, lectures, and creative and accessibility experiments. In addition to core readings and other research tools and materials, students build a reading list and artefacts file in-keeping with their areas of research and interest. Learners also gain experience with designing and carrying out a critical, arts-based and /or accessibility-attuned and community-engaged research project in an on-line space.

I have undertaken extensive advising and mentorship work with graduate and post-doctoral students as well as researchers at the University of Guelph and at other Ontario universities and teaching institutions.

The success of The Re•Vision Centre and the innovative approach to research using digital stories that I have developed with co-investigators has attracted many talented students, including three who have brought major tri-council scholarships to the university (a Vanier Scholarship, CIHR-funded Technology Evaluation in the Elderly Fellowship, and a two-year Post-Doctoral SSHRC Fellowship, a two-year Banting Fellowship).

I welcome students* who are interested in engaging with critical theories and innovative methodologies, and/or incorporating different media forms (such as videos, sound, visual arts) and artistic research methods in their research to contact me.

*Note: Master/PhD students only

For a full list of publications, go to carlarice.ca/writings.

Rice, C., Temple Jones, C., Mündel, I., Douglas, P., Fowlie, H., Friedman, M., Harrison, E., Hunter, D., Kelly, E., Krith, M., Merrai, S., (accepted). Stretching Our Stories (SOS): Digital worldmaking in troubled times. Public Journal.

La Rose, T., Rice, C., Laganse, C. Maxwell, C., Fisher, M., LeBrun, S., Ruxton, J., Bobier, D. Luzius-Vanin, C., Paton, C., Bahdri, S., El Kadi, R., Katz B. (accepted). Direct[Message]: Digital access to artistic engagement. Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies

LaMarre, A., Rice, C., Friedman, M., & Fowlie, H. (2022). Carrying stories: Digital storytelling and the complexities of intimacy, relationality, and home spaces. Qualitative Research in Psychology. DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2022.2047246

The Re•Storying Autism Writing Collective: Shields, R., Easton, S., Gruson-Wood, J., Gibson, M., Douglas, P., & Rice, C. (accepted). Storytelling methods on the move. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Special issue "Critical Autism Studies: Methodological Incursions". Authors are a collective of autistic and allied researchers from the Re•Storying project. Each member contributed substantively, and all contributions are valued. Author order intentionally subverts academic convention that values some types of academic labour over others and appears in reverse order of author seniority within the academy.

Wilks, C., Ensslin, A., Rice, C., Riley, S., Perram, M., Fowlie, H., Munro, L., & Bailey, A., (2022). Developing a choice-based digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy. Frontiers in Communication 6:786465. [Advanced on-line version: 20 January 2022]. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2021.786465.

Rice, C., Temple Jones, C., & Mündel, I., (2022). Slow story-making in urgent times. Cultural Studies, <=> Critical Methodologies, 22(3), 245-254. DOI: 10.1177/15327086211072230

Douglas, S., Tang, L., & Rice, C. (2022). Gender performativity and postfeminist parenting on children's television shows. Sex Roles. 86, 249–262. doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01268-9

Jones, C. Temple, Collins, K., & Rice, C., (2022). Staging accessibility: Collective stories of relaxed performance. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. [Advanced On-line Version 06 February 2022]. doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2022.2029388

Collins., K., Jones, C., & Rice, C., (2022). Keeping relaxed performance vital: Affective pedagogy for accessing the arts. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2022.19

Rice, C., Bailey, A., & Cook, K. (2021, advance online version). Mobilizing interference as methodology and metaphor in disability arts inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 1-13. [First Published 21 Sep 2021].  DOI: 10.1177/10778004211046249

Smoliak, O., LaMarre, A., Rice, C., & Tseliou, E., LeCouteur, A., (in press). Denials of responsibility in couple therapy. Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy. [Published online 11 Sept 2021] doi.org/10.1080/15332691.2021.1967248

Bailey, K. A., Rice, C., Gualtieri, M., & Gillett, J., (2021, ahead of print). Is #YogaForEveryone? The idealized flexible bodymind in Instagram yoga posts. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. [Published on-line 2 Dec 2021]. doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2021.2002394.

Smoliak, O., LaMarre, A., Rice, C., LeCouteur, A., & Tseliou, E., Myers, M., Vesely, L., Briscoe, C., Addison, M., & Velikonja, L. (2021, ahead of print). The politics of vulnerable masculinity in couple therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. [Published on-line: 23 June 2021]. DOI: 10.1111/jmft.12530.

Gruson-Wood, J., Rice, C., Haines, J., & Chapman, G. (2021). The emotional toll of postfeminist fatherhood. Gender, Work & Organization. 29(1), 256–272. doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12712.

Changfoot, N., Rice, C., Chivers, S., Olsen Williams, A., Connors, A., Barrett, A., Gordon, A., & Lalonde, G. (2021, ahead of print). Re-imagining aging: Crip, queer, and Indigenous futures. Journal of Aging Studies. [Published on-line: 3 June 2021] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2021.100930. 

Rice, C., Riley, S., LaMarre, A., & Bailey, A. (2021). What a body can do: Rethinking body functionality through a feminist materialist disability lens. Body image: An International Journal of Research. 38, 95-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.03.014

Jones, C. T., Rice, C., Chandler, E. Lam, M. & Lee, K. (2021). Toward TechnoAccess: A narrative literature review of disabled and aging experiences of using technology to access the arts. Technology and Society. 65() [Published on-line May 2021]. doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101537

Rice, C., Dion, S., & Chandler, E. (2021). Decolonizing disability and activist arts. Disability Studies Quarterly. 41 (2). doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i2.7130.

Chandler, E., Ignagni, E., Aubrecht, K. & Rice, C. (2021). Cripistemological approaches to disability arts and culture: Reflections on Cripping the Arts Symposium. Studies in Social Justice. 15(2). https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v15i2.2429

LaMarre, A., Rice, C., & Besse, K. (2021). Letting bodies be bodies: Exploring Relaxed Performance on the Canadian performance landscape. Studies in Social Justice. 15(2). https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v15i2.2430

Rice, C. Jones, C., Watkin, J., & Besse, K. (2021). Relaxed Performance: An ethnography of pedagogy in praxis. Critical Stages/Scènes critiques. 22. 1-19. http://www.critical-stages.org/22/relaxed-performance-an-ethnography-of-pedagogy-in-praxis/

Kelly, E., Manning, D., Boye, S., Rice, C., Owen, D., Shonefish, S., & Stonefish, M. (2021). Elements of a counter-exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics. Journal for the History of Behavioural Sciences.  57(1), 12–33.  https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22081

Rice, C., Cook, K., & Bailey, K. A. (2021). Difference-attuned witnessing: Risks and potentialities of arts-based research. Feminism & Psychology. 31(3), 345–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353520955142

Aubrecht, K. Kelly, C., & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2020). The Aging Disability Nexus. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

Friedman, M., Rice, C., & Rinaldi, J. (Eds.). (2019). Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice. New York: Routledge Press.