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    Who Counts as a Caregiver? Age, (Non-)Recognition, and the Discursive Politics of Care in Canada
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-21) Meeson, Jesse
    Canada is experiencing a crisis of care marked by an ever‑widening gap between care needs and the resources available to meet them. As writers like Nancy Fraser note, this crisis stems from the assumption that unpaid caregiving labour can be endlessly relied upon to fill systemic gaps in care provisioning. Advocacy groups such as the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence warn that the current model of caregiving is unsustainable, cautioning that without better support caregivers will face increasing hardship. While research in feminist economic geography has examined how patriarchy, racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteronormativity shape the distribution of care labour, this thesis turns to a less explored axis of social difference: age. Drawing on a discourse analysis of testimonies from young caregivers disseminated by support organisations in Ontario, as well as a systematised review of peer‑reviewed literature on ‘young caregiving,’ this thesis responds to calls for geographers to move beyond descriptive accounts of young people’s socially reproductive labour toward theorising how this labour relates to the broader economy. It examines how the term ‘young caregiver’ is defined and operationalised, and argues that young caregiver subjectivities are formed through and within discourses of care, love, and family. Building on literature that understands the family as both an ideology of work and a relation of force and control within capitalist society, the thesis explores how these discourses may contribute to an organisation of care rooted in coercion, producing conditions in which young people feel ‘forced to care.’ In sum, this thesis argues that attending to young people’s care labour is essential for rethinking the conditions shaping the future of (care) work, and for imagining more equitable futures.
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    Black-Box Firmware Compliance Testing of Programmable IC Chips Using Power Side-Channels
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-21) Patel, Jenish
    Modern safety-critical embedded systems depend heavily on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) programmable Integrated Circuits (ICs) sourced through complex global supply chains. Sourcing these ICs introduces a major vulnerability, as actors in the supply chain can maliciously tamper with or inadvertently modify the IC firmware prior to integration. These unauthorized modifications directly compromise firmware integrity, making it difficult for system integrators to verify that the IC runs qualified code without access to the source code or binary images. To address this challenge, we propose a firmware compliance method based on physical side-channel behavior. This method compares dynamic power consumption traces from an untrusted IC with a trusted golden reference that executes identical inputs to detect firmware non-compliance. Detecting non-compliant ICs requires a comparison method that is invariant to physical noise and sensitive to genuine firmware differences. Distortions vary across hardware and are challenging to predict before testing. Relying on a single fixed comparison method risks overlooking firmware changes, thereby reducing the efficacy of detecting non-compliance ICs. To address the challenge of selecting an effective comparison method under varying distortion levels, this thesis presents an evaluation framework that assesses a set of comparison methods for firmware compliance. Rather than prescribing a single method, the framework evaluates a suite of methods and produces performance metrics that determine which methods work well for a given target IC. Applying this framework across three commercial ICs shows that power-based side-channels can effectively detect non-compliant firmware and provides metrics to select the appropriate comparison method.
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    High Performance Computing for Pore Scale Design of Flow-Through Electrodes: A Water Desalination Application
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-21) McKague, Michael
    A growing population and environmental changes continue to threaten human development and supply of water and energy resources. Electrochemical devices are well positioned to solve many of these challenges due to their ability to store or use energy from renewable sources. Capacitive Deionization (CDI) is an example of such a device that uses electricity to desalinate water. It works by storing ions such as sodium and chloride from brackish water inside the electrical double layers of microporous carbon. Electrochemical devices such as CDI come in a variety of different architectures or flow configurations. Flow-through CDI is one example where water flows through the macropores of the activated carbon or other electrode. The advantage is the fast salt adsorption rates, but the disadvantage is the pumping power required to force fluid through the electrode’s pores. To mitigate pressure losses, hierarchical design of the pore space must be considered carefully. Pore scale models are an excellent route to study and optimize microstructure for flow-through electrodes. One of the challenges with optimization, however, is how computationally demanding it can be. Therefore, much of this thesis is focused on laying the foundation for optimization by applying high-performance computing to the pore scale including GPU accelerated solvers, JIT compilation, and automatic differentiation. The first two works are focused on efficient construction of pore networks from images or experimental data while the final work applies GPU and JIT accelerated solvers to better understand transport around engineered channels for flow-through CDI. This thesis explores two different methods for constructing pore networks that reliably characterize properties important for flow-through electrodes. In the first method, a modern and open-source implementation of the classic medial axis network extraction was written. It featured finding pores along long throats, a parallelized skeleton by chunking, and a fast walker method finding equivalent throat diameter. The new network extraction was tested on a 400³ image of Berea sandstone and the permeability predicted was within 5% of the lattice Boltzmann permeability. A speed-up of 4.2× compared to the watershed segmentation was observed. The second method calibrates a pore network to experimental data using gradient-descent optimization. The accessibility of automatic differentiation in increasingly popular machine learning packages was leveraged to write a fully differentiable pore network, suitable for gradient descent. This approach was used to match porosimetry and permeability data of a Berea sandstone in which a final combined loss of 9.7 × 10⁻⁴ was achieved. The optimization took roughly 20 minutes for a 10³ network of pores. Finally, both methods for constructing a pore network were evaluated and the second method was chosen to construct a pore network of a porous activated carbon electrode because no volumetric image was available. A pair of pore networks were fit to the available experimental data representing the entire range of pore sizes from 50 nm to 10 μm. The pore network was used to simulate ion transport in the pore space surrounding channels engineered for flow-through CDI. The pore network model was written entirely in JAX to access GPU-accelerated and JIT-compiled solvers for electrochemical simulation in pore networks. The computation time of JAX’s iterative implicit solvers were compared to PyPardiso’s direct solvers (after factorization) and results showed a speedup of 23× and 14× for mass and charge transport respectively. The effect of hole size on CDI cell performance was studied and a final recommendation for smaller holes (~30 μm) spaced 100 μm apart was modelled and 17× faster salt adsorption was observed.
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    Groundwork Gallery: A New Materialist Analysis of Arts-based Community Programming for the Building of Sociopolitical Consciousness
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-21) Ali, Aisha
    My thesis is an attempt at bridging community programming with broader anti-imperialist pedagogy in addition to academia. I use a New Materialist lens to evaluate my community project, Groundwork Gallery, which provided arts-based anti-imperial education to high school students from marginalized backgrounds. I received a grant from the city of Kitchener and used this to run a six week program biweekly. Students were mentored by six young adults from various artistic fields as they worked on creating their own pieces for an installation held at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. As an educator and anti-imperialist, the project was informed by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, to create a site for learning guided by the oppressed and a desire for liberation through the process of praxis: action and reflection in tandem. As both researcher and program lead, I was drawn to the way the multiple networks overlapped at the workshops, that they acted as sites for community development, anti-imperialist education and research. Using a New Materialist lens I address the ways various networks intersect and overlap to position the program as not only informed by the research process but created by the overlap of academia with the broader community. The reflective process created by the data collection required for my thesis informed not only my own experience with the workshops but that of the participants as well, enhancing the action-reflection dialectic required for Freire’s notion of true praxis. I argue that the overlap of the research assemblage and the workshop assemblage created a new site that enhanced the liberatory capacity of the space. I begin with an introduction on the theoretical background of both the project and the New Materialist lens used to assess the project. I then offer three student case studies, presenting their interview responses with my own reflections and their final pieces. I conclude by summarizing participant responses in interviews and focus groups in tandem, again, with my own reflections, before providing insight into the ways community programming and research can both be enhanced by acting as a joint entity rather than separate in community-based research. Programming run by researchers has enhanced capacity for participants as well as researchers by providing stronger connections with participants and subsequently an enhanced capacity for data-collection and insight, rather than the fly-on-the-wall approach that is typically employed.
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    Nutrient Dynamics in Prairie Stream Systems: Patterns, Drivers, and Stoichiometric Implications Across Spatial and Temporal Scales
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-21) White, Amy
    Riverine nutrient dynamics influence water quality, ecosystem processes, and nutrient export to downstream ecosystems, yet the processes that shape nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations and their stoichiometry remain poorly understood in many regions. Prairie rivers are particularly understudied, as their strong seasonality, intensive agricultural land use, and episodic hydrologic connectivity may generate stoichiometric patterns that differ from those observed in more studied temperate systems. This thesis examines how nutrient concentrations, loads, and N:P ratios vary across spatial and temporal scales in Prairie stream ecosystems, and how landscape characteristics, hydrologic conditions, and episodic nutrient inputs shape these patterns. To address this goal, I conducted three studies spanning basin-, tributary-, and segment-scales. In Chapter 2, I analyzed 25 years of water quality data from river monitoring stations across the Red-Assiniboine Basin to determine long-term trends in total and dissolved nutrient fractions and their stoichiometry, and to quantify the relative influence of changing catchment characteristics. In Chapter 3, I assessed seasonal spatial patterns in nutrient concentrations and stoichiometry across Red River tributaries, evaluated whether interannual variation in nutrient ratios coincided with shifts in dominant crop types, and examined how long-term seasonal discharge patterns influenced total and dissolved nutrient ratios. In Chapter 4, I quantified the magnitude and distribution of nutrient capture during a 15-day, high concentration wastewater effluent release in Devils Creek, using a mass balance approach to determine the amount of N and P captured and exported along a 17-km stream segment. In Chapter 2, long-term monitoring across the Red-Assiniboine Basin showed that N and P concentrations and stoichiometry were changing through time at most stations, but trends were spatially heterogeneous with no consistent directional shifts across the basin. Localized nutrient sources were important drivers of these patterns, and changes in catchment characteristics contributed to the observed trends to a greater extent than changes in streamflow conditions. In Chapter 3, total N:P ratios were near the Redfield mass ratio across 24 tributaries, whereas dissolved N:P were strongly N-depleted and declined from spring through autumn. Crop type did not consistently influence nutrient ratios, but long-term seasonal discharge was a driver of spring and summer stoichiometry. In Chapter 4, despite elevated nutrient loading from a wastewater effluent release, capture of N and P in Devils Creek was substantial, with 80 % of P captured and 100% of N captured. The findings of this thesis demonstrate that nutrient dynamics in Prairie rivers are influenced by landscape characteristics, hydrologic connectivity, nutrient sources, and episodic inputs. Across multiple spatial and temporal scales, dissolved and total nutrient fractions differed in their absolute values, ratios, and trends, demonstrating that the choice of nutrient fraction is central to interpreting stoichiometric patterns and nutrient depletion in Prairie rivers. The spatial heterogeneity observed across rivers, tributaries, and stream segments indicates that stoichiometric patterns in Prairie rivers emerge from localized nutrient sources, variable connectivity, and strong in-stream processing. Overall, this thesis underscores the need for management approaches that incorporate the sources of variability that govern nutrient dynamics in Prairie rivers.