UWSpace

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Recent Submissions

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    Beyond the Frame: Culture, Identity, and the Caribbean Sea Diaspora in Canada
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Espinoza, Ricardo
    The Caribbean Sea is a complex landscape that holds a storied past and a palimpsest of identities. Indigenous, colonial, and modern traditions shift like tides, and their relationships shape the collective identity of the Caribbean Sea’s inhabitants. Migration from European settlers, the colonial slave trade, and modern refugee crises have created a creolization of cultures and customs. Flows of migration by members of these community have thus created a global archipelago for the Caribbean Sea diaspora who are in constant dialogue and in search for community and representation in their respective exclaves. These migratory flows have allowed Canada and the Toronto area to become a region which welcomed this diaspora, establishing culture and community. Globalization and the internet have connected us, but in many ways also divided this diaspora from traditional cultural and artistic community activities that must be experienced physically. “Beyond The Frame: Community, Identity, and the Caribbean Sea Diaspora in Canada” attempts to restore the flows of these connections by means of artistic expression and by establishing a central place of community for the Caribbean Sea diaspora in Canada. Approaching culture and identity from a relational sense, the design for an arts-based centre for immigrants of the Caribbean Sea in Toronto that is rooted in the typologies surrounding the Caribbean Sea takes shape. Cultural institutions are typologies where new relationships are constantly forged between artifacts, people, and space, creating new meaning based on past experiences. This thesis argues that architecture is a tool that helps establish and democratize connections, exploring firsthand accounts from immigrants and their views on identity and culture, leaders from organizations within the Greater Toronto Area, and responsive design concepts in order to produce a representative architectural snapshot of the Caribbean Sea diaspora today.
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    Time stepping methods for coupled fluid-rigid body simulation
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Gurditta, Rikin
    Interaction between fluids and solid objects is ubiquitous in everyday life, yet the resulting motion is too intricate for visual effects artists and animators to realistically depict by hand. Instead, artists turn to computer graphics applications that employ physics-based animation to simulate these complex phenomena. Some of these applications solve the incompressible Euler equations coupled with the rigid body equations to compute the motion of an incompressible fluid interacting with undeformable solids. Of particular interest is two-way coupling, in which the fluid and solids both affect each other’s motion. Many methods have been developed to improve the realism of fluid simulations, allowing them to simulate more compelling scenarios. There are several time stepping schemes for fluid simulation in the literature, presenting ways to evolve the motion of the fluid over time that may generate more energetic or more accurate results. In particular, we focus on the BDF2 and Advection-Reflection families of schemes due to their accuracy and their improved ability to preserve the kinetic energy of the fluid. Our goal in this thesis is to extend these time stepping schemes to two-way coupled fluid-rigid body simulation, to yield more compelling simulations of the interactions between these two types of materials. We catalogue some of the popular time stepping schemes for fluid simulation, and explain their relations to methods of solving ordinary differential equations. Then, taking as our starting point the popular method of Batty et al., we re-derive the time stepping scheme originally proposed for coupled systems, and derive new schemes for coupled systems corresponding to the previously discussed fluid schemes, along the way comparing to the coupled time stepping scheme proposed by Gibou and Min. We measure the accuracy, energy-preservation, and computational cost properties of each scheme implemented within a 2D simulation, presenting quantitative and qualitative results. We hope our work encourages further investigation into the theoretical basis as well as the qualitative properties of coupled fluid-rigid body simulation.
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    Vertex models for the product of a permuted-basement Demazure atom and a Schur polynomial
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Miller, Timothy
    This thesis is about a manifestly positive combinatorial rule for the expansion of the product of two polynomials: Schur polynomials and permuted-basement Demazure atoms. Special cases of the latter polynomials include Demazure atoms and characters; there are known tableau formulas for their expansions when multiplied by a Schur polynomial, due to Haglund, Luoto, Mason and van Willigenburg (2011). We find a vertex model formula, giving a new rule even in these special cases, extending a technique introduced by Zinn-Justin (2009) for calculating Littlewood–Richardson coefficients. We derive a coloured vertex model for permuted-basement Demazure atoms. This model is inspired by Brubaker, Buciumas, Bump and Gustafsson's model for Demazure atoms (2021) and Borodin and Wheeler's model for permuted-basement nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials (2022). We make this model compatible with an uncoloured vertex model for Schur polynomials, putting them in a single framework. Unlike previous work on structure coefficients via vertex models, a remarkable feature of our construction is that it relies on a Yang–Baxter equation that only holds for certain boundary conditions. However, this restricted Yang–Baxter equation is sufficient to show our result.
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    Green Space Equity & Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study between North St. James Town & High Park-Swansea Communities in Toronto
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Nankisore, Chelsea
    In cities shaped by unequal development and growing environmental pressures, urban green spaces are increasingly recognized not just as aesthetic luxuries but as fundamental components of livable, healthy, and equitable communities. While public parks and naturalized areas linked to a wide range of social, mental, and ecological benefits, the accessibility and distribution of these spaces are often influenced by systemic inequities embedded in urban planning, land use policy, and neighborhood development trajectories. This thesis investigates these disparities by comparing two socioeconomically and spatially distinct communities, High Park-Swansea (HPS) and North St. James Town (NSJ). Guided by social‑ecological systems (SES), political ecology, and community‑based participatory research (CBPR), the study asks how social fabric and planning histories shape the equitable distribution and lived experience of public green space. The research investigates green space quality, accessibility, and use in each neighborhood, focusing on how socio‑economic status, density, infrastructure, and community engagement intersect to produce divergent relationships with urban nature. Drawing on 63 surveys and 24 in‑depth interviews, it employs inductive coding and narrative analysis to identify themes related to accessibility, inclusiveness, safety, ecological quality, and psychological well‑being. Findings show that access to green space is not defined by proximity or quantity alone but is closely tied to perceptions of safety, historical marginalization, and belonging. HPS emerges as a neighborhood with relatively high green space coverage, affluent demographics, and strong stewardship, while NSJ is characterized by dense high‑rise housing, constrained green infrastructure, and heightened social vulnerability. An analysis of Toronto’s green space policies indicates that comprehensive goals are often undermined by weak enforcement, a lack of spatially disaggregated values, and limited community‑oriented design standards, contributing to a spatial politics of exclusion. Moreover, it explores how Toronto’s green space policies, while comprehensive on paper, often lack enforcement mechanisms, spatially disaggregated benchmarks, and community-oriented design standards. By mapping community narratives to broader structural trends, the study reveals how planning practices, past and present, contribute to a spatial politics of exclusion where certain communities are underserved by design. In doing so, it informs concrete recommendations for municipal planners, including the development of neighborhood-level green space equity indicators, integration of community-informed design criteria in development approvals, and policy tools that ensure green infrastructure investment is responsive to local needs. These insights hold relevance beyond the context of Toronto, contributing to global conversations on urban sustainability, environmental justice, and inclusive planning decisions.
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    Considerations for Commons Governance in Chilika Lagoon: New-Commonisation through Codification
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Murray, Kaitlin Sarah
    This thesis examines how communities can re-establish governing authority over shared environmental resources (commons) after periods of dispossession (decommonisation), a process described as ‘new-commonisation’. Focusing on Chilika Lagoon, India, it explores how small-scale fishery communities might regain autonomy following decades of externally-driven decommonisation, caused by privatization, encroachment, elite capture, and fragmented state interventions. The central argument is that legally-grounded recognition of commons is helpful for re-gaining rights and essential for protecting communities from renewed external threat. Drawing on process-tracing analysis of three cases; Shimshal Valley in Pakistan, forest governance under India’s Forest Rights Act (2006), and Locally Managed Marine Areas (LMMAs) in Papua New Guinea; the study identifies how community mobilisation and legal codification interact to regain and stabilize self-managed commons. Though the findings are hypothesis generating rather than hypothesis testing, they suggest that enduring governance outcomes emerge when communities achieve de jure recognition of de facto rights, and that their success depends on contextually-dependent enabling conditions, such as equitable enforcement, multi-level support and the mechanism for legal rights. As no two commons are identical, there is no single path to codification; legal arrangements must respond to the specific socio-political and ecological context of each community. This research contributes to commons theory by framing codified legal backing as a critical, yet under-developed, dimension of enduring commons governance, in the face of persistent external pressures.