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Recent Submissions

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    Disruptive climate policy from wells to wheels: Integrating demand- and supply-side climate governance in oil-producing states
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-22) Greene, Sarah
    Fossil fuel-producing states occupy a paradoxical position within climate governance. Many have adopted increasingly ambitious climate policies, including net-zero commitments, renewable energy deployment strategies, and transportation electrification programs. Yet many of these same jurisdictions continue to expand fossil fuel production and export infrastructure. As a result, climate ambition and fossil fuel dependence increasingly proceed in parallel. This tension raises a critical governance challenge: how can fossil fuel-producing states accomplish deep decarbonization while simultaneously reducing their economic, political, and institutional dependence on oil and gas? This dissertation examines that question through three interconnected manuscripts that explore the relationship between demand-side and supply-side climate governance in fossil fuel-producing states. Situated within global environmental governance and drawing on comparative political economy, carbon lock-in, and sustainability transitions scholarship, the dissertation applies an analytical framework centred on institutions, interests, and ideas to examine the political conditions that enable or constrain deeper transitions away from fossil fuels, particularly oil. The first article, published in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics in 2024, examines Denmark’s emergence as a global first-mover in supply-side climate governance through its decision to phase out future oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. The analysis addresses the political, institutional, and ideational conditions that enabled an explicit fossil fuel phase-out policy to emerge in a fossil fuel-producing economy. The findings show that supply-side climate governance is politically feasible and emphasize the role of national first movers in shaping emerging forms of global fossil fuel governance. The second article, accepted with revisions at Energy Research & Social Science in June 2026, explores the demand side of climate governance through a comparative examination of transportation electrification in Norway and Canada. The findings show that ambitious demand-side decarbonization can substantially reduce emissions, boost technological change, and build durable political support for climate action. However, transportation electrification does not automatically reduce fossil fuel production. Rather, the analysis shows that demand-side transitions can create important political, economic, and institutional conditions for broader transition while remaining compatible with continued extraction under existing political-economic arrangements. Building on these findings, the third article, accepted with revisions at The Extractive Industries and Society Journal in June 2026, examines Canada’s challenge of integrating demand-side and supply-side climate policy within a deeply carbon-intensive federal political economy. Drawing on insights from Denmark and Norway, the analysis demonstrates how institutions, interests, and ideas persist to reproduce fossil fuel dependence while identifying pathways for aligning both sides of the climate policy “scissors” within a broader decarbonization strategy. Collectively, the dissertation argues that deep decarbonization in fossil fuel-producing states requires more than reducing emissions or constraining fossil fuel production in isolation. It requires transforming the institutions, interests, and ideas that reproduce fossil fuel dependence and politically integrating demand-side and supply-side climate governance. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to scholarship on carbon lock-in and transition politics by shifting attention from explaining the persistence of fossil fuel dependence toward understanding the political conditions under which fossil fuel-producing states may begin to move beyond it. The findings further suggest that demand-side transitions may create political and economic conditions that increase the feasibility of future supply-side climate governance, pointing toward a potential sequencing dynamic in pathways toward deep decarbonization.
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    Craftsmanship's Value: Exploring the Shifting Role of the Maker in Contemporary Slip-Cast Fabrication
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-22) Haddy, Candace
    As technologies become increasingly integrated into production, the maker’s relationship with material is transferred from direct physical engagement to roles as programmer and operator, leading to a risk in loss of craftsmanship. While technological advancement has increased the efficiency and possibilities of architectural production by reducing time, labour, and cost, it has also altered the relationship between designers, makers, and materials. This raises questions about how values of craftsmanship such as reflective judgement learned through making and a responsibility toward the user and society, can persist within contemporary fabrication. This thesis investigates the role and value of craftsmanship in contemporary production processes by speaking with craftsmen through field research and working with slip casted ceramics, a pottery-forming process using absorbent molds with liquid clay (slip), to design and produce a screen system. Field research examines slip casting across different scales and methods of production through visits to Bryan Hopkins - an expert in small-scale slip casting, Ludowici Roof Tiles - a large-scale production facility for ceramic architectural components, Joshua Stein at Radical Craft - an experimental ceramicist who pushes the capabilities of fabrication methods, and a variety of toilet manufacturing facilities - high-quality mass production facilities of slip casted ceramic toilets. Each case study adapts the traditional slip casting process toward innovation or efficiency, revealing different values and motivations behind the maker’s choice of technique. These findings inform research through fabrication in which the identified methods and design goals are tested through the fabrication of a slip-cast screen system, providing a means for further analysis of craftsmanship and its role in contemporary craft. The cases studies and fabrication research are focused on the shift in knowledge, tools, and material connection from handcraft to contemporary machine fabrication, which can be further understood through architect and researcher Dr. Christoph Schindler’s framework of fabrication technology and evolution of techniques. Schindler describes fabrication processes as a continuous development with three waves of processing technology - hand tool, machine-tool, and information-tool technology, relating to evolving industrial developments and technological introductions. While this evolution can optimize production and expand its possibilities, the research examines the tensions and consequences that arise when knowledge shifts away from the craftsperson, particularly the potential loss of craftsmanship. As material and process knowledge enables informed design decisions, transferring this knowledge from the human to machines and digital information can distance the designer from the material and, consequently, from their responsibility toward the environments they create. This physical design analysis establishes the role and value of craftsmanship within contemporary production while informing a slip-cast fabrication methodology that incorporates these values. The research is evaluated through the conclusions drawn from comparing the values embedded within different approaches to production across varying scales and design intentions.
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    Children's Exploration Distinguishes Necessary and Merely Possible Outcomes
    (American Psychological Association, 2026) Andreuccioli, Luisa; Mazor, Sophie; Begus, Katarina; Bonawitz, Elizabeth; Dension, Stephanie; Walker, Caren M.
    Preschoolers often fail tasks that require that they select between a necessary and a merely possible outcome. Prior work has interpreted these failures as evidence that children hold a minimal representation of possibility or as reflecting performance factors. However, all previous paradigms have operationalized children’s modal understanding as a discrete choice or outcome, making it difficult to distinguish between these accounts. We introduce a continuous measure of search behavior to assess how modal status regulates exploration. American 3- and 4-year-olds (48% female, 52% male) searched for an object dropped into one of two boxes after passing through a set of either transparent (yielding a single necessary location) or opaque tubes (yielding two possible locations). In Experiment 1, both age groups spent relatively less time searching the first location they approached and switched more often when the outcomes were merely possible than when the outcome was necessary. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern in a touchscreen version. Experiment 3 demonstrated the same effect while controlling for object tracking by equating inferential demands across conditions. Across experiments, children’s search behavior was aligned with modal status, indicating that representations of necessity and possibility guide exploration before children reliably succeed on discrete choice modal reasoning tasks. These results suggest children’s early sensitivity to modal concepts is expressed in their continuous search behavior, shaping real-time decision making. Our findings inform theories of modal reasoning in early childhood, suggesting that modal representations may be more readily expressed through graded patterns of exploration rather than discrete choices.
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    The Counterfactual Detective: People Think About What Could Have Been to Uncover Past Events
    (Sage Journals, 2026) Bauman, Jordan; Pawsey, Hailey; Denison, Stephanie; Freidman, Ori
    We reveal a way that people use counterfactual thinking: They use it to infer motives and solve mysteries about what happened in the unseen past. In three preregistered experiments, participants (total N = 1,242) were asked to determine which of two competitors in a contest had sabotaged a third competitor. Participants often succeeded in identifying the culprit when counterfactual reasoning could be used to judge whether each suspect profited from the sabotage. Participants had more difficulty, though, when the mystery required using counterfactuals to judge how much each suspect profited. These findings show that people can use counterfactual reasoning to infer others’ motives and to determine who was most likely to have produced past events. But they find this easier when counterfactuals support binary judgments rather than graded ones. Besides revealing a way that people use counterfactual reasoning, the findings are informative about how people learn about the unobserved past.
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    Ice Hockey Puck Detection and Tracking from Broadcast Video
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-22) Salass, Liam
    Accurate localization and tracking of fast-moving sports objects in broadcast video remain a fundamental problem in computer vision, enabling downstream applications such as tactical analysis, player analytics, automated highlight generation, officiating assistance, and augmented reality broadcasting. In ice hockey, this problem is particularly difficult because the puck occupies only a few pixels, rapidly accelerates, exhibits motion blur, becomes occluded by players and boards, and is observed under continuously changing camera viewpoints. These characteristics substantially degrade the performance of conventional appearance-based detection and tracking methods. This thesis presents an end-to-end framework for puck detection and tracking that combines contextual reasoning, geometric scene understanding, and temporal motion modelling. First, I propose a context-aware puck detector, termed Player Localization Using Contextual Cues (PLUCC). By using player segmentation as an explicit contextual prior, the proposed method exploits the strong spatial relationship between players and the puck to improve localization accuracy over appearance-only detection approaches. The thesis then assesses the suitability of modern visual object trackers for broadcast hockey footage through a comprehensive evaluation of modern tracking algorithms. Experimental results show that existing appearance-based trackers remain fundamentally limited by the puck’s small image footprint, rapid motion, frequent occlusions, and visually similar distractors, motivating an alternative tracking paradigm. To address these limitations, we introduce a geometry-aware tracking framework in which puck motion is represented in a temporally stable planar coordinate system rather than directly in image space. A monocular 3D reconstruction pipeline estimates the broadcast camera pose and reconstructs the rink surface, while semantic segmentation removes dynamic objects to enable robust plane estimation. Projecting detections into this canonical coordinate system substantially reduces perspective distortion and camera-induced motion, producing geometrically consistent trajectories throughout time. Temporal motion modelling is subsequently performed within the planar representation using sequence-based learning, allowing the model to focus on the puck’s underlying physical motion rather than compensating for camera motion. Collectively, the proposed framework demonstrates that combining contextual detection with geometry-aware motion modelling provides a more robust foundation for puck tracking than conventional appearance-based approaches alone. Although developed for broadcast ice hockey, the suggested approach is largely sport-agnostic and is readily applicable to other sports involving small objects moving on approximately planar playing surfaces, including soccer, tennis, basketball, lacrosse, and baseball.