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Recent Submissions

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    Investigating the Experiences of Racialized Immigrant Women throughout the Continuum of Emergency Medical Care
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-09) Jalili, Ailin
    Background: Racialized immigrant women in Canada experience a unique set of barriers when navigating healthcare systems, yet little is known about how they experience emergency medical care. Medical emergencies can encompass interactions with informal peer networks, emergency medical services (EMS), and in-hospital staff. Across these encounters, access is shaped by perceptions of candidacy; the ongoing process through which individuals negotiate their eligibility for care. Research Questions: (1) How do racialized immigrant women recognize and define medical emergencies in relation to their social, cultural, and prior healthcare system contexts? (2) When reflecting on their emergency care experiences, how do racialized immigrant women perceive their health encounters across the continuum of emergency care? (3) How do racialized immigrant women negotiate candidacy for emergency medical care, and how do interactions with providers affect their perceptions of legitimacy, deservingness, and future help-seeking behaviours? Methods: An exploratory qualitative study design was employed. Purposive and snowball sampling methods were used to recruit 10 participants who were racialized immigrant women (n=10). Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand participants’ emergency care experiences in the Kitchener-Waterloo (KW) region and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Interviews were interpreted using the candidacy framework. Data analysis was carried out using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) to identify themes across the interviews. Findings: Participants experienced compounding barriers across the emergency care continuum, with perceptions of candidacy continuously contested. Findings identified emergency experiences marked with perceptions of gender bias, limited health system literacy, symptom dismissal, and long wait times. As a result, participants often self-managed acute distress, delayed care-seeking, and/or relied on informal support networks. Implications: These findings highlight several strategies to mitigate barriers in receiving high-quality emergency care, as highlighted by participants: (1) Implementation of education to support health system literacy for newcomers; (2) Gender-sensitive and culturally informed protocols across EMS and emergency hospital staff; and (3) Improved communication strategies. Conclusions: This exploratory study is one of the first in Canada to explore racialized immigrant women's experiences across the emergency care continuum. Candidacy for care was continuously contested, and participants often internalized negative encounters as personal failures rather than gaps in the system. This lead many to develop distrust towards providers and hesitancy around future help-seeking. These findings point to the need for gender-sensitive, culturally responsive, and communication-focused interventions to provide more equitable care for racialized immigrant women.
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    "Now I am here and growing wild." Nature as a Space of Female Subject Formation in Marlen Haushofer's Die Wand and Katharina Köller's Wild wuchern.
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-08) Josupeit, Marieke
    This thesis examines nature as a space of female subject formation in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963) and Katharina Köller’s Wild wuchern (2025). Drawing on ecofeminist theory, particularly Val Plumwood’s critique of dualistic thinking and her concept of the relational self, as well as Donna Haraway’s relational understanding of subjectivity and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, the thesis develops a theoretical framework that connects the hierarchical oppositions of nature/culture, human/non-human, and man/woman. This framework is complemented by literary spatial theory and approaches to gendered embodiment in order to examine how experiences of natural space and the body contribute to processes of female subject formation. The analysis shows that in both novels, nature functions as an ambivalent space in which patriarchal and anthropocentric structures become visible and contestable. In Die Wand, the nameless protagonist’s isolation dissolves the autonomous, anthropocentric subject model in favor of a relational self grounded in interdependence with the natural world, while her body is reconceived from an aesthetic, inferior object into a functional tool of survival. In Wild wuchern, the protagonist’s confrontation with the wilderness and her cousin, who embodies a non-normative, nature-connected identity, enables her to challenge her internalized feminine ideal and patterns of patriarchal violence and control. The comparative reading demonstrates that both novels construct nature as a relational and embodied space that enables the protagonists to renegotiate gendered identities and established forms of human-nature relations, rather than returning to an essentialist female nature.
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    The Grail Papers
    (University of Waterloo, 1994-03) Raymond, Darrell; Wood, Derick
    Grail is a package for computing with finite-state machines and regular expressions, written in C++. Grail supports input and output of textual descriptions of automata and regular expressions, conversions between machines and regular expressions, and other operations. Grail can be used as a set of shell-callable processes, a library of functions, or as individual C++ classes. Version 2.0 of Grail supports parameterizable machines and expressions. This collection of papers includes a description of the history and design of Grail, a user's guide, a programmer's guide, and the main pages for each of Grail's filters.
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    Some numerical results on algorithms for Sturm-Liouville problems
    (University of Waterloo, 1994-01) Ji, Xingzhi R.
    For the numerical solution of Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problems, finite difference methods and Prufer methods are two kinds of popular methods. However, the conditions under which each method is more efficient are not obvious. The experimental results reported in this paper show: (1) The relative efficiency of the methods depend on the desired accuracy; (2) Finite difference methods, with correction techniques, remain effective even for eigenvalues with higher oscillation number.
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    Parallel program and asynchronous circuit design
    (University of Waterloo, 1994-03-30) Ebergen, Jo C.; Segers, John; Benko, Igor
    Asynchronous circuit design is a beautiful application area for any formalism that can reason about parallelism. By means of two small, but challenging, exercises we illustrate the similarities and differences between parallel program and asynchronous circuit design. The exercises are simple to state and have many solutions, which are sometimes surprisingly efficient. They all illustrate many aspects of asynchronous circuit design. For each exercise we present several solutions, which are analyzed with respect to delay assumptions, safety, progress, and performance issues. We also mention some open problems.