Carla is author of over 40 academic articles on appearance and difference published in both national and international refereed journals. She is widely cited by critical scholars working in the fields of obesity, eating disorder, and body image disparagement and increasingly, in the field of disability studies and narrative and arts-based methods. Using the knowledge generated through her clinical and research activities, she has co-authored popular and professional resources and her work has been translated into French, Spanish, and Farsi.
Carla’s writing spans several fields with particular interests in debates about eating disorder aetiology; effects of sexual, racial, medical, and colonial trauma on embodiment; gender, race, class, and colonial dimensions of obesity prevention discourses and programs; controversy about “healthy eating” and “healthy weights” messages and BMI surveillance in health and physical education curricula; and the effects of body-based harassment on children and youth. Most recently, she has written on embodied self reflexivity in qualitative research, teaching, and practice; arts-based research methods of digital storytelling and research-based drama; disability arts as “body becoming” pedagogies, or ways of opening possibilities for disabled and fat embodiment through art; and feminist efforts to change limiting, image-driven, idealized conceptions of bodies by creating an more inclusive theory of feminist beauty and sensory pleasure.