Section 1 3 5 Evidence Report 20251009

Generated: October 23, 2025 at 04:55 AM

Chapter 1 Computational Analysis

Section 1.3.5 Evidence Report: Educational Theory and Digital Resistance

Generated: 2025-10-09

De Certeau’s Strategies vs Tactics Framework

1. Institutional Strategies (Control Mechanisms)

Evidence of temporal and procedural control through institutional infrastructure:

  1. submission_1id479g r/CUNY Score: 256 2148 chars
    • Category: Funding freezes and institutional control
    • Excerpt: “Finish your degree as fast as you can, these funding freezes are not going away. I don’t think enough people here really appreciate how these freezes on federal funding are going to affect students and the campuses…”
    • Theoretical connection: Shows institutional temporal pressure and systemic control
  2. comment_ga7w8kj r/Baruch Score: 17
    • Category: Enrollment appointment system
    • Excerpt: “Fuck this enrollment appointment shit. Mine was at 7PM and all the good BPL professors are gone.”
    • Theoretical connection: Temporal stratification of access based on institutional prioritization
  3. comment_m4jqlak r/CUNY Score: 16
    • Category: Priority registration
    • Excerpt: “Priority registration. It’s extremely important, especially if you are in a popular major.”
    • Theoretical connection: Institutional mechanism creating hierarchical access
  4. comment_kk7l56k r/HunterCollege Score: 8
    • Category: Space restricted by major
    • Excerpt: “Heavily recommend going into the Baker Theatre Building… since mainly theatre majors only ever go to that building, it’s pretty quiet and empty inside!”
    • Theoretical connection: Spatial control through major-specific access
  5. comment_hucuiuc r/CUNY Score: 15
    • Category: Class cancellations and structural constraints
    • Excerpt: “CUNY is laying off thousands of adjunct instructors, which means a lot of classes are being canceled. Some schools are able to move students to different sections that happen to be running at the same time and days…”
    • Theoretical connection: Institutional precarization affecting student pathways

2. Student Tactics (Workarounds & Innovations)

Evidence of tactical resistance through system manipulation:

  1. comment_lwoakv3 r/CUNY Score: 54
    • Category: ePermit system
    • Excerpt: “My brother in christ, have you considered an ePermit? 😐”
    • Theoretical connection: Inter-campus registration bypass mechanism
  2. comment_ewlyuik r/CCNY Score: 23 [Previously documented]
    • Category: Shopping cart manipulation
    • Excerpt: “You can put classes in your shopping cart before your enrollment date and then just enroll in them when it’s your time”
    • Theoretical connection: Temporal circumvention of registration windows
  3. comment_lefsdw7 r/HunterCollege Score: 18 [Previously documented]
    • Category: Waitlist monitoring
    • Excerpt: “Keep checking the enrollment throughout the day. People drop classes all the time, especially in the first week”
    • Theoretical connection: Exploiting system volatility for access
  4. comment_mrnfhk9 r/CUNY Score: 25
    • Category: E-permit as tactical option
    • Excerpt: “Absolutely don’t give up your BA over a single class. Try E-permitting, look around for professors with high ratings on RMP and try to take them.”
    • Theoretical connection: Cross-institutional navigation to bypass local constraints
  5. comment_mfzamrf r/CUNY Score: 27
    • Category: Strategic absence
    • Excerpt: “Honestly, most classes are just an hour and 15 minutes, so 20 minutes late is a decent chunk of that… it probably makes more sense to email the professor and just skip the whole class.”
    • Theoretical connection: Tactical management of presence/absence
  6. comment_gdhsxax r/CUNY Score: 13
    • Category: Bureaucratic navigation
    • Excerpt: “Fight it. Talk to the departmental chair. Talk to the dean if students. They will fill you in on how to fight it and appeal, etc. Students usually actually do pretty well in these circumstances if they fight it.”
    • Theoretical connection: Using institutional appeals processes tactically

Harney & Moten’s Undercommons Framework

1. Textbook Piracy & Resource Sharing (Fugitive Planning)

  1. submission_1my4vi6 r/CUNY Score: 585 2339 chars
    • Category: Satirical resource sharing guide
    • Excerpt: “CUNY students beware! Sites to avoid!! (FREE TEXTBOOKS) With the next semester starting soon at CUNY, it’s important to be prepared for the semester, textbooks included. As we all know, textbooks can be expensive and you definitely should pay full price…”
    • Theoretical connection: Collective resistance to educational commodification through ironic pedagogy
  2. submission_1i8gtgt r/CUNY Score: 213
    • Category: Celebration of free access
    • Excerpt: “how it feels to find your textbook pdf for free only for the professor to assign homework through Cengage”
    • Theoretical connection: Joy in fugitive resource acquisition, frustration with platform capitalism
  3. submission_iefxlt r/CUNY Score: 161
    • Category: Resource sharing infrastructure
    • Excerpt: “Sites to get college textbooks for free or at low-cost - a thread… libgen.is, z-library.org, b-ok.xyz…”
    • Theoretical connection: Building underground educational commons

2. Peer-to-Peer Educational Navigation (Study as Sociality)

  1. comment_fhdvsyc r/CCNY Score: 42 [Previously documented]
    • Category: Alternative educational pathways
    • Excerpt: “I’d recommend looking into MIT OpenCourseWare or Coursera for the concepts you’re struggling with. Sometimes a different explanation makes all the difference”
    • Theoretical connection: Seeking knowledge outside institutional mediation
  2. comment_m9xp3x8 r/CUNY Score: 33
    • Category: Peer support for system navigation
    • Excerpt: “brightspace (BS) is cheaper than blackboard. if you’re having trouble navigating BS, there are student tutorials: [link to CUNY guide]”
    • Theoretical connection: Students creating parallel support structures
  3. comment_mbjad4x r/CUNY Score: 120
    • Category: Alternative career imagination
    • Excerpt: “My backup career option is to upload 2 hour long lo-fi study music videos onto YouTube.”
    • Theoretical connection: Imagining labor outside credential economy

3. Mutual Aid & Solidarity (What We Owe Each Other)

  1. comment_m26nqzc r/CUNY Score: 66
    • Category: Recognition of care
    • Excerpt: “As a cuny student, I appreciate you looking out for students who are experiencing rough patches during their college career. I think a lot of us think most professors don’t care about us or don’t notice if one of us is falling behind, so to read this is nice and refreshing.”
    • Theoretical connection: Acknowledging care labor in hostile institutional environment
  2. comment_m83p8rp r/CUNY Score: 45
    • Category: Knowledge exchange
    • Excerpt: “are you a professor? this is pretty good advice, thanks for mentioning school OneDrive has unlimited storage, I didn’t know”
    • Theoretical connection: Gratitude for tactical knowledge sharing
  3. comment_k2cvjmh r/Baruch Score: 39
    • Category: Solidarity with system disruption
    • Excerpt: “Whoever is holding baruch’s online assets hostage, plz know, we appreciate your hard work 🙏”
    • Theoretical connection: Support for acts of digital resistance

Linguistic Markers: Impossibility Framing

“Won’t be able to” and related constructions marking structural barriers:

  1. comment_mbdd4my r/CUNY Score: 97
    • Matched term: “can’t afford”
    • Excerpt: “Federal grants and loans for students would probably be either paused or ended all together. Anyone who doesn’t qualify for other sources of funding or can’t afford to pay out of pocket will most likely drop out.”
    • Theoretical connection: Economic impossibility as structural violence
  2. comment_loqr80z r/Baruch Score: 55
    • Matched term: “won’t be able to”
    • Excerpt: “Almost heading into the 30s POC, my advice woman to woman is to just focus on your studies and yourself first before anything. Only reciprocate the same energy and behavior a man gives you.”
    • Theoretical connection: Gendered impossibilities in academic progression
  3. comment_jvbhn01 r/Baruch Score: 26
    • Matched term: “won’t be able to”
    • Excerpt: “If you’re a transfer, can’t register if you don’t attend orientation. Sure so that must mean I get to register with everyone else right? NOPE orientation is like 6 months after registration opens…”
    • Theoretical connection: Transfer student structural disadvantage
  4. comment_jh6pezk r/Baruch Score: 43
    • Matched term: “cannot”
    • Excerpt: “Our fees will increase, and as a religious person myself, I feel like this is a terrible cost to students… people who are nonbelievers will be forced to pay for something that they cannot participate in…”
    • Theoretical connection: Mandatory fees for inaccessible services
  5. comment_mb3hf0d r/CUNY Score: 30
    • Matched term: “cannot”
    • Excerpt: “👆🏽⬆️ THIS. Cannot express how perfectly explained this comment is. This party is knowingly spreading the illusion of no hope to make you feel like you should just roll over and take it, give up.”
    • Theoretical connection: Political impossibility and resistance

Key Findings for Section 1.3.5

De Certeau Application:

  • Strategies: Enrollment appointments (comment_ga7w8kj), priority registration (comment_m4jqlak), major-restricted spaces (comment_kk7l56k), funding freezes (submission_1id479g)
  • Tactics: Shopping cart trick (comment_ewlyuik), ePermit workarounds (comment_lwoakv3, comment_mrnfhk9), waitlist monitoring (comment_lefsdw7), bureaucratic appeals (comment_gdhsxax)
  • Pattern: Students consistently develop tactical responses to each strategic control mechanism

Harney & Moten Application:

  • Fugitive Planning: Massive textbook sharing network (submission_1my4vi6, 585 upvotes shows community solidarity)
  • Study as Sociality: Alternative educational resources (MIT OCW, Coursera) shared peer-to-peer
  • Debt as Mutual Obligation: “we appreciate your hard work” (comment_k2cvjmh) to system disruptors

Impossibility Grammar:

  • Frequency: “Won’t be able to” and variants appear across multiple crisis domains
  • Function: Marks structural barriers rather than individual failures
  • Resistance: Even impossibility statements often include tactical alternatives

Cross-Framework Synthesis

The evidence reveals CUNY Reddit as a site where:

  1. Institutional strategies create temporal, spatial, and procedural control
  2. Student tactics consistently subvert these controls through system knowledge
  3. Collective resistance operates through resource sharing and mutual aid
  4. Impossibility grammar articulates structural violence while maintaining agency

This aligns with both De Certeau’s tactical/strategic distinction and Harney & Moten’s conception of the undercommons as a space of fugitive planning and study.

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Evidence References (25 items) ▶

Comments (21)

Submissions (4)