Critical, intrusive family environments are a predictor of relapse and poor functional outcome in schizophrenia. Reactivity in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) has been proposed as a potential mechanism underlying this link, but little research has examined ANS physiological reactivity in schizophrenia in the context of family interactions. Further, physiological covariation – physiological interdependence between individuals – predicts important relationship and mental health outcomes, yet no work has examined physiological covariation between people with schizophrenia and their family members. The current study investigated physiological reactivity and physiological covariation during a conflict conversation between young adults with schizophrenia (n = 20) and without schizophrenia (n = 29) and their parents. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and inter-beat interval (IBI) were recorded during a 10-minute conversation about an area of conflict in the participants’ relationship. Participants rated relationship qualities and affect, and participants with schizophrenia were rated on symptom severity. Results indicated that young adults with schizophrenia reported higher negative affect after a conflict conversation and had lower average RSA relative to baseline during the conflict conversation compared to young adults without schizophrenia. IBI and RSA covariation were associated with lower parental caring, with the effect of caring on RSA covariation driven by the control group. Within the schizophrenia group, weaker RSA covariation was related to higher negative symptoms. Together, these findings provide novel support for the importance of ANS, particularly PNS, reactivity and covariation in family relationships in people with and without schizophrenia.

This thesis is a document about process. Notes on the Occasion of the Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, is the English title of a bilingual anthology that set the conceptual groundwork for a day-long event that meditated upon the different aesthetics of response that writers, artists and activists in Southern California and Northern Mexico (Alta and Baja California) employ their respective practices to address positions of precarity after 20 years of free-trade implementation in North America. The anthology compiles the work of Antena, Alicia Garza, Cristina Rivera-Garza, Manuel Paul Lopez, Pepe Rojo, Ultra-red and Amy Sanchez-Arteaga. The text was activated through a series of conversations that took place April 15, 2016 at UCI, during the symposium, A Conversation in Three Parts, also curated by Amy Sanchez-Arteaga. This document constitutes a reflection on the process and methodology of curating this text and this gathering, and the social and political implications of that process upon the field of curatorial studies. These documents were experiments in inciting dialogue around aesthetics, politics and their embodiment in the LA/TJ megalopolis. The conversations and activities that took place during A Conversation in Three Parts, were means to activate Notes… for the first time and model ways that the text could be used in the future.

This thesis considers what a curatorial practice becomes in the cleft between traditional modes of exposition (as textual document or performative discussion), circulation and anecdote: How the same theoretical and aesthetic object (in this case a book) traffics between different contexts and can potentially make space for new political and aesthetic propositions in those contexts. Or, to put it another way how poetics are always already bound up with politics.