UWSpace

UWSpace is the University of Waterloo’s institutional repository for the free, secure, and long-term home of research produced by faculty, students, and staff.

Depositing Theses/Dissertations or Research to UWSpace

Are you a Graduate Student depositing your thesis to UWSpace? See our Thesis Deposit Help and UWSpace Thesis FAQ pages to learn more.

Are you a Faculty or Staff member depositing research to UWSpace? See our Waterloo Research Deposit Help and Self-Archiving pages to learn more.

Photo by Waterloo staff

Communities in UWSpace

Select a community to browse its collections.

Recent Submissions

  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Challenging Stigma and Enacting Citizenship Through Liberatory-Relational Songwriting with People Living with Dementia
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-07-23) Kurta, Taylor
    People living with dementia (PLwD) frequently experience stigma, social exclusion, and limited opportunities to participate in creative and collaborative processes that centre their voices and lived experiences. Dominant biomedical and tragedy narratives of dementia often emphasize decline, dependency and the total loss of self, overlooking the relational and creative capacities of PLwD. This is especially true for PLwD later in the disease progression who are written off and denied their social citizenship rights, including opportunities to contribute to their own and others’ lives. In response to these limitations, this dissertation explores how collaborative songwriting rooted in liberatory and relational processes supports the enactment of relational citizenship and challenges stigmatizing discourses of dementia. Grounded in relational and critical theoretical perspectives, including relational caring philosophy, relational citizenship, and community and music-centred approaches to music therapy, this research employed liberatory/activist arts and critical arts-based inquiry to facilitate a collaborative songwriting project with nine PLwD in a residential care home in Ontario, Canada. Over nine weeks, the songwriters engaged in a series of songwriting sessions culminating in the public release of an original song, Wisdom and Respect, and an accompanying short film. Analysis of the songwriting sessions illustrated how the liberatory, relational process created opportunities for songwriters to share their personal histories and experiences, attend to one another, negotiate creative decisions, and engage in critical dialogue, reflection, and collective meaning-making through music. Through this analysis, the Liberatory-Relational Dementia Songwriting Framework was developed, identifying key relational literacies (i.e., processes and ways of being and relating in the world that support embodied capacities and cultivate opportunities for relational connections to flourish) that supported the songwriting process. These relational literacies include relational knowledging, relational attuning, and relational decision-making. The research also demonstrated how the song and film functioned as a counter-narrative to dominant discourses of dementia by highlighting the relational, creative, and expressive capacities of the songwriters. Preliminary feedback from audience members at the community release party indicated shifts in perceptions of the capacities and personhood of PLwD, with some participants expressing intentions to change how they interact and engage with PLwD in their own lives. This research contributes theoretical, methodological, and practical insights to dementia studies, music therapy, and leisure studies. It challenges dominant biomedical conceptualizations of leisure, and specifically music in the dementia context, and instead offers a liberatory approach that recognizes and supports the continued and evolving capacities of PLwD later in the disease progression to engage in social justice projects. As both a theory and a relational practice, relational citizenship involves knowing and being known, belonging and solidarity, attunement and recognition, and the agency to act together. The Liberatory-Relational Dementia Songwriting Framework created opportunities for these dimensions to be expressed and sustained within the group. By documenting a collaborative songwriting methodology grounded in relational and liberatory arts-based approaches, this dissertation offers a framework for researchers, practitioners, and communities seeking to use participatory arts to challenge stigma and support the enactment of relational citizenship with PLwD, including those later in the disease progression.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Monetary policy regimes and beliefs
    (University of Waterloo, 1999-06) Andolfatto, David; Gomme, Paul
    This paper investigates the role of beliefs over monetary policy in propagating the effects of monetary policy within the context of a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. In our model, monetary policy periodically switches between low and high money growth regimes. When individuals are unable to directly observe the current regime, they will assign some probability to the low money growth, low inflation regime base don observed money growth rates. We show that for an empirically relevant money growth process, beliefs evolve slowly in the wake of a regime change. As a result, our model is able to capture some of the observed persistence of real and nominal variables following such a regime change.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Immigration control and the welfare state
    (University of Waterloo, 1997-01-28) Myers, Gordon M.; Papageorgiou, Yorgos Y.
    We examine immigration policy and its redistributive effects using a model of a rich country which must spend on boarder control in order to regulate immigration from a poor country. There are owners and workers in the rich country, and a public sector which makes redistributive transfers from owners to workers. We first consider the case where illegal immigrants have access to the public sector, a situation currently observed in many countries. We show that as border control becomes more expensive inequality in the rich country increases, redistributive transfers may increase or decrease, some immigration is permitted and foreign aid may be used by the rich country in order to reduce the migration pressure along its border with the poor country. Because of nonconvexities, we also show that a small decrease in the aversion to inequality or a small increase in the poor country's population can lead to illegal immigrants from the public sector (e.g. California Proposition 187). We find that the possibility of collapse vanishes and that the rich country takes the toughest official stance on immigration but does not enforce it with border controls.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Technology diffusion and aggregate dynamics
    (University of Waterloo, 1998-01) Andolfatto, David; MacDonald, Glenn M.
    This paper develops and analyzes a macroeconomic model in which aggregate growth and fluctuations arise from the discovery and diffusion of new technologies; there are no exogenous aggregate shocks. The temporal behavior of aggregates is driven by individuals' efforts to innovate and/or make use of others' innovations. Parameters describing preferences, production possibilities and learning technologies are estimated using post-war U.S. data. The model delivers predicted aggregates that grow and fluctuate much like the data. The key features of post-war growth are explained by new technologies that differ in terms of the magnitude of their improvement over existing methods and the difficulty of acquiring them. The model implies a negative trend in technological dispersion, and that the generally lower growth witnessed during the last two decades is the result of new technologies offering comparatively minor or less broadly-applicable improvements. Data on the growing and fluctuating share of engineering Ph.D.s support the model's technological interpretation of the growth facts, and data on patent applications and adult schooling are consistent with the notion that newer technologies are more specific and proprietary.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Evaluating LLM Robustness Under Adversarial and Conflicting Evidence
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-07-23) Amirshahi, Shakiba
    Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications that rely on externally retrieved evidence, including health question answering, scientific claim verification, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). A fundamental question underlies these systems: do LLMs genuinely reason over the evidence they receive, or do they primarily follow the stance expressed in the provided documents? This thesis investigates this question through two complementary empirical studies that examine model behavior under harmful, adversarial, and conflicting evidence conditions across health question answering and claim verification tasks. Study 1 evaluates RAG robustness in the health domain using expert-annotated collections from the TREC 2020 and 2021 Health Misinformation Tracks. Across six LLMs, eight document types, and three query framing conditions, results show that retrieved evidence strongly shapes model behavior regardless of its reliability. Helpful documents drive ground-truth alignment to near-ceiling levels, whereas adversarial documents generated from scratch can reduce alignment to near-zero. Even a single helpful document within an otherwise adversarial retrieval pool substantially improves robustness, highlighting retrieval composition as a key factor in RAG performance. Models also demonstrate greater robustness on COVID-19 queries than on general health questions, suggesting that resistance to misleading evidence may vary across domains. Study 2 extends the analysis to explicit claim verification, evaluating five LLMs across two domains: Check-COVID, a scientific verification benchmark, and Emergent, a journalistic rumor dataset. Under both single- and paired-document settings, models frequently reverse their verification decisions when evidence stance is flipped, struggle to maintain stable judgments under conflicting evidence, and exhibit sensitivity to document order. These vulnerabilities persist across both scientific and journalistic domains, suggesting that evidence-driven behavior is not domain-specific but a broader limitation of current verification systems. Across both studies, adversarial documents generated from scratch are consistently more damaging than naturally occurring harmful content. Taken together, the findings show that strong benchmark performance does not necessarily indicate robust evidence reasoning. Helpful evidence can mask differences between models, whereas adversarial evidence exposes substantial variation in robustness. These results highlight the need for evaluation protocols that explicitly test model behavior under misleading and conflicting evidence and motivate future evidence-grounded systems that assess evidence credibility rather than simply reproducing its stance.