Chapter 1: Introduction, Context, and Literature Review

Establishing Pre-Pandemic Baseline and Theoretical Framework

7377 words Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Introduction, Context, and Literature Review (Revised)

Student Support Networks in Digital Educational Spaces

1.1 Introduction: The March 2020 Transition (2,500 words)

1.1.1 Activity Patterns and Community Response

Start with the crisis moment that makes the research urgent

In March 2020, activity across CUNY’s Reddit communities surged by 290%. Students who participated on Reddit increased their posting dramatically: from 929 posts in r/CUNY pre-pandemic (2011-March 2020) to 91,505 posts post-pandemic (March 2020-December 2024). This spike marked more than increased online activity; it signaled that students recognized problems collectively that many had been navigating alone for years. The platform became a space where individual struggles gained collective visibility.

The activity surge revealed patterns of peer-to-peer support operating outside institutional channels. Students turned to each other for help with food insecurity, housing crises, financial aid confusion, and mental health struggles. These were not new problems created by the pandemic but rather ongoing challenges that grew increasingly urgent when institutions closed and students lost access to campus resources. In turn, Reddit provided infrastructure for horizontal knowledge sharing, where students helped students navigate bureaucratic systems, coordinate resource distribution, and offer emotional support during hours when administrative offices were otherwise shuttered or unresponsive.

A post from February 12, 2020 illustrates these patterns weeks before COVID-19 reached New York. A Queens College computer science student described conditions that would later intensify but already existed: the department operated “over maximum capacity,” adjuncts earned “$20k-25k annually,” and students relied on Chegg servers and ePermit workarounds when institutional resources proved inadequate. The student detailed overcrowded classes, underpaid instructors, and systematic reliance on third-party platforms. This post matters because it was written before anyone knew a pandemic would strike: a harbinger of an intensifying crisis and evidence of accumulated effects from long-lasting austerity conditions. The COVID-19 crisis thus made visible isolated experiences that students had been managing for years through tactical knowledge sharing and peer production networks held both offline and on.

This dissertation treats March 2020 as an inflection point that made visible two interconnected dynamics. First, I examine how the pandemic intensified student reliance on digital peer networks as crisis heightened demand for support operating outside institutional channels. The 290% activity surge reveals more than increased posting. It shows fundamental shifts in how digitally-engaged students organized collective knowledge, coordinated mutual aid, and constructed survival infrastructure when official systems proved inadequate. Second, I trace how decades of disinvestment in CUNY created compound vulnerabilities long before the pandemic. Overcrowded classes, underpaid adjuncts, inadequate financial aid, and decaying infrastructure produced overlapping crises that students navigated individually until March 2020 made collective response urgent. Reddit functions as the platform where these dynamics became hyper-visible through 273,702 posts across 8 CUNY subreddit communities spanning 2011-2025. The platform’s affordances—persistence, searchability, and pseudonymity—enabled students to document struggles that remained hidden in campus interactions, creating a searchable archive of institutional challenges and vernacular responses.

1.1.2 Research Questions

Frame research questions emerging from crisis

Three intersecting questions guide this study. Each probes different dimensions of how CUNY’s digital communities function as peer support systems.

How had students already built parallel infrastructure through Reddit before the pandemic? I treat Reddit-based student communities as existing coordination infrastructure that pre-dated COVID-19. The tactical knowledge circulating on CUNY subreddits represents collective knowledge work. Students shared what they learned about registration, financial aid navigation, and course selection through trial and error. They managed the complexity and inadequacy of official institutional systems by building peer knowledge networks. By examining pre-pandemic Reddit discourse, I document how students had already engineered solutions to structural problems. This knowledge would prove crucial when institutions moved online unexpectedly in March 2020.

What conditions already existed before March 2020 that shaped how students experienced the pandemic transition? I investigate whether the crisis visible during COVID-19 was genuinely new or rather an intensification of ongoing conditions. My analysis traces expressions of material precarity, institutional frustration, and tactical knowledge sharing across the pre-pandemic baseline period (2011-March 2020). Posts from February 2020 document overcrowded CS programs, adjunct precarity, and student reliance on third-party platforms weeks before anyone knew COVID would strike. Similar patterns appear throughout the pre-pandemic archive: housing insecurity, food access struggles, financial aid confusion, and broken institutional infrastructure. I argue that what became visible during the pandemic was not created by it. The pandemic intensified and made collectively urgent what students had been navigating individually for years.

When March 2020 hit, these existing communities became crisis infrastructure, providing tactical knowledge, resource sharing, and peer support as institutions closed. The 290% activity spike revealed not new problems but newly urgent collective sense-making among students who had been navigating crises individually. Yet what persists beyond the acute crisis moment is the community itself. Even as remote learning normalized and institutions reopened, these Reddit communities continued expanding, developing deeper expertise while sustaining peer support networks in ways that suggest something more durable than temporary crisis response.

Why did CUNY’s distributed 8-subreddit system enable this sustained community growth in ways that centralized institutional forums did not? I investigate the architectural implications of decentralized versus centralized models. CUNY’s distributed architecture enables campus-specific communities—r/CUNY, r/Baruch, r/HunterCollege, r/QueensCollege, r/JohnJayCollege, r/CityCollege, r/Brooklyn_College—that develop local expertise while sharing knowledge horizontally across campus boundaries. In contrast, the more centralized subreddits of r/NYU and Columbia funnel all discussion through single institutional channels. By examining how CUNY communities sustained and expanded after the acute pandemic crisis passed, I can shed light on whether distributed systems better serve the temporal and emotional logics of peer support.

I extend this question to consider how students work beyond Reddit’s internal federated structure to a broader transmedial ecosystem that includes platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Coursicle. Students use Reddit for persistent knowledge discovery while coordinating real-time collaboration through Discord servers and mobile messaging groups. This multi-platform coordination becomes particularly visible when institutions block Discord on campus WiFi networks; Reddit threads immediately circulate workarounds (VPNs, alternative clients, mobile hotspots), demonstrating how distributed systems prove more resilient to institutional censorship than centralized platforms would be. By analyzing this transmedial circulation, I can understand whether distributed architectures enable not just campus-specific expertise but also cross-platform tactical knowledge that sustains peer support despite institutional constraints.

1.1.3 Study Scope and Implications

Position the stakes

This dissertation examines 273,702 posts across eight CUNY subreddit communities from 2011 to 2025, revealing how Reddit-participating students transform generic platform features into survival infrastructure. I examine peer support systems that operate through digital platforms rather than formal institutional channels, focusing on how students build knowledge infrastructures independently when institutional support systems prove inadequate. By analyzing Reddit communities where students coordinate mutual aid, share tactical knowledge, and document institutional failures, I trace the emergence of peer production systems that sustained CUNY students through crisis moments and continue to organize collective problem-solving in their aftermath.

While extensive research addresses online learning platforms, learning management systems, and official university communications, less attention focuses on how students build knowledge infrastructures independently when institutions prove inadequate. This research matters because it documents how students respond to compound vulnerabilities produced by decades of disinvestment. CUNY’s operating budget declined 19% between 2008-2020 while enrollment increased 11%, creating overcrowded classes, underpaid adjuncts, inadequate mental health services, and decaying physical infrastructure. Students navigating these conditions built horizontal support networks that became essential during the pandemic but remain necessary afterward. Understanding these systems reveals how institutional precarity produces peer coordination infrastructure that operates continuously rather than episodically.

My analysis focuses exclusively on students who participate in Reddit communities. This subset represents digitally-engaged students comfortable with pseudonymous platform discourse, not CUNY’s entire student body. The 8 subreddit communities I examine (r/CUNY, r/Baruch, r/HunterCollege, r/QueensCollege, r/JohnJayCollege, r/CityCollege, r/Brooklyn_College, r/NYCCC) generated 273,702 posts between 2011-2025, creating a substantial but bounded archive. Students who relied on in-person peer networks, family support systems, or other digital platforms remain outside this study’s scope.

I treat Reddit data as a window into specific peer support practices rather than representative of all CUNY student experiences. The platform’s affordances—persistence, searchability, pseudonymity—enable particular forms of knowledge sharing that differ from ephemeral conversations in Discord voice channels or private WhatsApp groups. Students use Reddit for questions requiring archived answers (registration procedures, course recommendations, financial aid deadlines) while coordinating real-time collaboration elsewhere. This methodological boundary means I capture certain support practices while necessarily excluding others.

CUNY represents a distinctive case for studying peer support infrastructure. As the nation’s largest urban public university system serving predominantly working-class students, first-generation college students, and immigrants, CUNY operates under resource constraints that differ from elite private institutions. Students managing full-time work, family caregiving responsibilities, and financial precarity navigate institutional systems differently than those with abundant financial resources and flexible schedules. Reddit communities documenting these navigation strategies reveal how structural inequalities shape students’ knowledge-seeking behaviors and mutual aid practices.

Reddit’s specific platform architecture matters for this analysis. Unlike centralized institutional forums where administrators control moderation, visibility algorithms, and data retention, student-moderated subreddits enable peer governance. Students determine community rules, enforce behavioral norms, and curate collective knowledge without institutional oversight. This autonomy creates conditions where students document institutional failures openly, share tactical knowledge about circumventing bureaucratic obstacles, and coordinate mutual aid that operates independently from official channels.

The timing of this study proves consequential. By examining discourse spanning 2011-2025, I capture patterns across multiple crisis moments: Hurricane Sandy (2012), federal sequestration cuts (2013), CUNY budget crises (2016-2017), COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), and federal aid suspensions (2025). This longitudinal scope reveals whether peer support infrastructure emerged reactively during acute crises or developed proactively through accumulated institutional frustrations. The temporal breadth enables analysis of whether these communities function as temporary crisis infrastructure or sustained knowledge systems.

While this dissertation focuses specifically on CUNY Reddit communities, the patterns I document have broader implications for understanding how students navigate under-resourced institutions. Public universities across the United States face similar disinvestment patterns, producing comparable challenges with overcrowded classes, inadequate mental health services, confusing financial aid systems, and aging infrastructure. Students at these institutions likely develop analogous peer support networks using whatever digital platforms prove accessible and functional for their specific contexts.

The architectural questions I investigate—distributed versus centralized systems, transmedial coordination across platforms, student governance versus institutional control—extend beyond Reddit to broader debates about digital infrastructure for peer learning. As institutions increasingly adopt centralized learning platforms that privilege institutional surveillance over student autonomy, understanding how students build alternative coordination systems becomes essential. The tactical knowledge students share about circumventing institutional constraints (VPN usage when Discord gets blocked, ePermit workarounds when registration systems fail, third-party platforms when institutional resources prove inadequate) reveals the ongoing tensions between institutional control mechanisms and student survival strategies.

1.2 Reddit as Research Site: Why Platform Analysis Matters

1.2.1 What is Reddit? Platform Architecture and Affordances

Reddit operates as a distributed network of semi-autonomous communities called subreddits, each maintaining distinct norms, moderation practices, and participant bases while sharing platform-wide technical features. Unlike centralized institutional forums such as Blackboard or university portals, Reddit’s architecture enables what Fiesler et al. (2018) call “governance development,” where community-specific rules emerge from participant needs rather than administrative mandate. For CUNY students, this means r/Baruch, r/HunterCollege, and r/CUNY coexist as separate communities while platform features enable cross-community information flow through user participation across multiple subreddits.

The platform’s technical design embodies what danah boyd (2011) identifies as four key affordances of networked publics: persistence (content remains accessible across years), searchability (students find solutions to crises posted long ago), replicability (tactical knowledge gets copied and adapted across campuses), and scalability (peer support extends beyond physical campus boundaries). These affordances prove particularly consequential for understanding crisis response. When a Hunter College student posts about housing insecurity at 2am, that post persists indefinitely, becoming searchable by future students facing similar crises while the knowledge replicates across CUNY campuses and support scales beyond what individual advisors could provide during office hours.

Reddit’s pseudonymity enables what Proferes (2017) calls “context collapse management”: the strategic separation of multiple social contexts that would normally be collapsed together in institutionally-mediated spaces. Users identified by chosen handles rather than legal names can make vulnerable disclosures that institutional surveillance would inhibit. Students discussing food insecurity, financial aid confusion, mental health crises, or institutional failures can seek peer support without risking their academic standing. Yet critical scholarship on contextual integrity (Nissenbaum 2004, 2010) and context collapse (boyd 2014) complicates this apparent protection. Nissenbaum’s framework reminds us that privacy depends on appropriate information flows between contexts; those contexts can be violated even when formal anonymity exists. boyd documents how online platforms systematically collapse contexts that people work to keep separate, suggesting that pseudonymity offers incomplete protection against institutional surveillance, platform surveillance, or identification through pattern analysis. The permanence of Reddit archives, the platform’s corporate interest in user data, and the visibility of participation patterns all challenge the assumption that pseudonymity creates genuine context separation. Yet despite these limitations, Reddit’s pseudonymous architecture still shapes what discourse becomes possible. Struggles that remain hidden in campus interactions, where identity-based power dynamics operate more visibly, can surface in Reddit threads precisely because the formal separation of contexts, however fragile, enables students to take risks they wouldn’t take under institutional observation. The platform creates what Zhu et al. (2023) document as crisis-responsive discourse communities. These emerge precisely when institutional channels prove inadequate, operating within the liminal space between pseudonymity’s genuine affordances and its meaningful constraints.

1.2.2 Why Reddit for This Study? Methodological Advantages

This dissertation studies Reddit not because it represents all student experience (it demonstrably doesn’t) but because its specific affordances enable analytical perspectives that complement traditional methods, revealing patterns, temporalities, and collective processes difficult to capture through interviews, surveys, and institutional data—particularly unsolicited discourse and after-hours activity.

Reddit preserves 14 years of unsolicited discourse spanning 2011-2025, enabling analysis of how crisis response patterns evolved before, during, and after the pandemic without retrospective bias. Unlike interviews requiring participants to reconstruct memory or surveys prompting specific topics chosen by researchers, Reddit discourse emerges from students’ own priorities at moments of actual need. When a student posts “i won’t even have a house to live under or food to eat LMAO” at 1:36am on a Tuesday, that captures crisis temporality that scheduled research encounters cannot access.

The 273,702 CUNY posts across 8 subreddit communities provide scale sufficient for distinguishing individual experiences from systematic patterns. While a single interview about food insecurity documents one person’s struggle, Reddit’s 216 posts about food reveal discourse intensification, temporal clustering around finals weeks, campus-specific resource sharing networks, and linguistic patterns differentiating CUNY from elite institutions. This scale doesn’t replace ethnographic depth (Chapter 3 provides that) but complements it by showing which individual experiences represent broader structural patterns versus idiosyncratic circumstances.

Reddit’s upvoting mechanism provides built-in validity checking, where highly-scored posts demonstrate community recognition and agreement. When posts explaining ePermit navigation receive substantial upvotes, this signals collective validation that the strategy works and matters to the community. When posts about federal aid suspension panic garner hundreds of upvotes, those votes represent students confirming “this is my experience too.” Unlike researcher-assigned codes or interview quotes selected for representativeness, Reddit engagement scores show what communities themselves consider important, accurate, and worth amplifying.

Reddit’s horizontal participation structure (students helping students without institutional mediation) reveals vernacular knowledge systems operating outside official channels. Unlike focus groups with researchers facilitating or institutional surveys with administrators framing questions, Reddit threads document peer-to-peer knowledge construction, tactical development, and collective sense-making as they happen, circulating shopping cart registration tricks, midnight course monitoring strategies, and financial aid navigation templates through community validation rather than administrative guidance. Studying Reddit reveals what Harney and Moten (2013) call “study” in the undercommons: learning that happens despite institutions rather than through them.

Reddit operates 24/7 while CUNY administrative offices maintain 9am-5pm schedules, creating methodological access to crisis temporality that institutional research cannot capture. The concentration of help-seeking posts between midnight and 5am becomes visible through timestamps preserved in platform metadata, revealing when students experience acute crises and how peer networks provide support during hours when financial aid offices, academic advisors, and even campus security operate minimally. This temporal mismatch between institutional time and student time becomes analytically visible through Reddit’s persistent record, showing when discourse actually occurs rather than when researchers schedule access.

1.2.3 What Reddit Reveals That Other Methods Cannot

Platform analysis of Reddit enables specific analytical perspectives impossible through alternative approaches.

While interviews require researchers to ask questions and surveys constrain responses through predefined options, Reddit reveals what students prioritize enough to post about voluntarily. The relative frequency of food insecurity mentions, financial aid confusion, housing crises, and mental health struggles emerges from students’ own concerns rather than researcher prompts, providing evidence of what actually matters in daily navigation of CUNY.

Reddit threads document iterative problem-solving as collective process. When a student posts confusion about TAP requirements, multiple peers contribute partial knowledge until someone with experience clarifies, creating a searchable resource for future students. This knowledge construction process becomes visible through threaded comments, timestamps, and edit histories, showing how communities collectively develop expertise rather than simply possessing it individually.

Students participating across multiple CUNY subreddits reveal comparative experiences, posting about Baruch registration difficulties, then Hunter course quality concerns, then general CUNY financial aid confusion. This cross-community participation, traceable through user histories, enables analysis of how tactical knowledge transfers across campuses while showing how students experience the federated system’s distributed advantages and shared struggles.

Reddit preserves evidence of what doesn’t work: crashed CUNYfirst servers, unreachable advisors, contradictory financial aid communications, and broken elevators trapping students. Unlike institutional assessments reporting successes or exit surveys reaching only completers, Reddit captures frustration, failure, and abandonment from those institutions lose. This documentation of organized abandonment (Gilmore 2007) emerges precisely because Reddit operates outside institutional control.

Platform persistence enables observing how discourse changes across years without researcher presence altering the phenomenon studied. Pre-pandemic tactical knowledge, pandemic crisis adaptation, post-pandemic persistence of intensified patterns—these temporal dynamics become visible through longitudinal platform analysis in ways that snapshot studies or retrospective interviews cannot achieve.

1.2.4 What Reddit Cannot Show: Methodological Limitations

Platform analysis reveals patterns, processes, and collective dynamics while systematically obscuring individual experiences, causal mechanisms, and non-participating populations.

Reddit users represent a self-selected subset of CUNY students possessing internet access, digital literacy, platform awareness, and willingness to post publicly. Students without devices remain invisible; those avoiding social media don’t appear; international students unfamiliar with Reddit aren’t represented; students who navigate crises silently leave no trace. Any claims about “CUNY students” based on Reddit data must acknowledge this selection, recognizing that Reddit shows patterns among digitally-engaged students who choose platform participation rather than providing representative samples of all enrollees.

Reddit posts document what students choose to disclose rather than necessarily revealing what students experience. While food insecurity mentions show students willing to discuss hunger publicly, absence of mentions doesn’t prove absence of need. The relationship between experience and disclosure remains analytically opaque; platform data shows discourse patterns without directly revealing underlying realities.

Reddit posts lose embodied context as facial expressions disappear, tone of voice vanishes, and immediate physical circumstances that shape meaning in face-to-face interaction get stripped away. Text-based analysis provides what Geertz (1973) calls “thin description” compared to ethnographic “thick description.” Although Reddit preserves temporal context through timestamps, maintains spatial context through campus affiliations, and captures social context through community responses, it cannot capture the full situatedness of lived experience.

Computational pattern recognition identifies correlations—food insecurity posts cluster during finals, late-night posts receive higher engagement, multi-topic discourse increased substantially—without establishing causation. Why these patterns emerged remains unclear; individual motivations driving participation stay hidden; which interventions might prove effective can’t be determined through platform data alone. Patterns demand explanation through theoretical frameworks (Section 1.3) and complementary methods (ethnographic analysis in Chapter 3).

Reddit preserves what students post without capturing silences between posts. When users vanish after crisis posts or one-time posters seek help then disappear, we cannot know if they found solutions, dropped out, transferred, or simply stopped using Reddit. Platform data documents presence rather than absence, participation rather than non-participation, discourse rather than silence.

1.2.5 Synthesis: Reddit as Methodological Complement

This dissertation treats Reddit analysis as complementary to traditional qualitative methods rather than their replacement. Platform analysis at scale (Chapter 2) reveals patterns requiring explanation, while ethnographic close reading (Chapter 3) grounds those patterns in individual testimonies. Together, these approaches enable what Pink et al. (2016) call “non-digital-centric” digital ethnography, treating online discourse as embedded in material campus life rather than a separate virtual domain.

Reddit’s methodological value lies precisely in showing what institutional research cannot: after-hours support networks, tactical knowledge circulating outside official channels, collective sense-making when institutions fail, temporal evolution of crisis discourse, and vernacular infrastructure students build despite rather than through administrative systems. These patterns, processes, and practices become analytically visible through platform affordances—persistence, searchability, scale, and community validation—remaining invisible to methods requiring researcher intervention, institutional permission, or bounded timeframes.

The following section establishes the theoretical frameworks enabling interpretation of what Reddit’s affordances make visible.

1.3 Theoretical Framework: Digital Infrastructure and Community Knowledge (4,500 words)

1.3.1 Digital Ethnography as Method and Theory

Building from Christine Hine’s concept of the “embedded, embodied, and everyday” internet (2015), this study approaches CUNY Reddit not as a separate virtual domain but as interwoven with campus life. As Hine argues: “The internet has become embedded into our daily lives, no longer an esoteric phenomenon, but instead an unremarkable way of carrying out our interactions with one another” (p. 1). This framework reveals how digital and physical experiences merge throughout student life.

Bart Barendregt’s umbrella concept of digital ethnography (2021) provides methodological grounding: “an umbrella term for what is a set of highly flexible and adaptive methods that study the use of digital technology both on- and offline” (p. 169). His concept of “polymedia” (how users navigate between platforms) illuminates CUNY students’ movement between Reddit and other communication systems. A Baruch post captures this tension: “Everyone’s constantly on their phones but yet they can’t respond to a message for the group project.”

Students coordinate across multiple platforms simultaneously, generating redundant questions in WhatsApp groups while spreading crisis alerts across “here snapchat,Twitter,Instagram.” Comprehensive guides navigate from Reddit to NYC.gov benefits systems, demonstrating multi-platform institutional navigation. Post-pandemic, student organizations maintain presence across Discord, GroupMe, and Reddit, creating platform ecosystems rather than singular digital homes.

Physical campus spaces reveal digital/material entanglement as phone calls disrupt library study spaces and noise-cancelling headphones create contested boundaries between digital bubbles and physical presence. Students discover institutional resources through Reddit rather than official channels, celebrating finding free WSJ/NYT access and revealing Reddit as shadow IT support system. Barendregt’s critique of “dematerialized” digital technologies proves essential; Reddit depends on server farms, campus WiFi, and student devices whose availability shapes participation possibilities.

Sarah Pink and colleagues’ principle of “non-digital-centric-ness” (2016) prevents fetishizing Reddit as purely digital space. Their framework for studying “relationships,” “social worlds,” and “localities” offers tools for understanding how r/CUNY functions as both networked public and local community. The concept of studying “events” applies directly to analyzing how March 2020 unfolded across subreddits as simultaneous local and collective experience.

1.3.2 Ethnomethodological Foundations and Authority

Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (1967) provides crucial grounding for understanding how Reddit users accomplish social order through everyday practices. His focus on “accountability” illuminates how upvoting creates community coherence through reflexive validation, where high-scoring posts make collective values visible: posts defending CUNY become highly-validated institutional pride statements, while others enforce academic freedom norms, recognize shared financial vulnerability, and correct social norms through community enforcement. These scores accomplish accountability by making community standards publicly measurable rather than merely reflecting popularity.

The concept of “indexicality” (context-dependent meaning) explains how tactical knowledge becomes comprehensible only within CUNY’s specific bureaucratic culture. Baruch posts demonstrate this with 5-step Coursicle strategies: “Take the closed class and put it in your shopping cart on CUNYfirst…Wait for waitlists to be dropped usually happens 2-4 days before semester begins.” Additional insider knowledge includes swap strategies, ePermit expertise, and bookmark tricks to avoid CUNYfirst login errors, all indexical expressions requiring institutional context.

Garfinkel’s emphasis on practical reasoning reveals how students collectively construct navigational knowledge through iterative problem-solving. Long threads serve as living guides updated each semester for BMCC nursing programs, coordinate academic advisor crisis responses, and troubleshoot transfer complexities. These threads document the “documentary method” (students building shared interpretive schemes for understanding CUNY’s systems through collaborative practice).

James Clifford’s critique of ethnographic authority (1983) shapes this study’s approach to representation. His call for “polyphonic” ethnography (multiple voices and perspectives) aligns with preserving Reddit users’ own analyses rather than imposing external frameworks. As Clifford notes: “There is no longer any place of overview (mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life” (p. 140). This supports treating Reddit posts as primary theoretical contributions, not just data.

Annette Markham’s interrogation of digital fieldwork methods (2012) addresses the fundamental question: “What would Malinowski do?” Her critique that digital research methods “hardly resemble fieldwork anymore” (p. 434) pushes toward innovative approaches. For CUNY Reddit, this means focusing on information flows and community formation processes rather than bounded site observation.

1.3.3 Critical Infrastructure Theory

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of organized abandonment (institutions maintaining facades while withdrawing from missions, 2007) offers one analytical lens for understanding patterns of reduced institutional support visible in CUNY’s pre-pandemic Reddit discourse. A February 2020 Queens College post provides systematic analysis documenting this abandonment before crisis made it visible: “First of all the CS program at QC is over maximum capacity…doubled it’s enrollment…the department does not have enough staff to facilitate all the students.” The post details adjunct precarity (“Adjuncts make $20k~25k at QC (St. Johns pays double)”), institutional cheating enablement (“teachers don’t have the resources to track cheaters…class sizes of 200+ students”), and credential devaluation (“My resume has gone straight to the trash as soon as they see Bachelors from QC”).

Additional evidence documents systematic withdrawal across campuses: Hunter posts catalog “broken elevators, dirty asf…worst campus ever,” Baruch reports “No working internet and we’re still expected to take finals??”, Queens documents financial aid owing students thousands of dollars with semesters nearly over, and Hunter asks “Why do none of the water fountains work? Giant holes in the wall.” These aren’t isolated incidents but patterns of maintained institutional facades with withdrawn functional support.

Steven J. Jackson’s concept of “broken world thinking” and repair as innovation (2014) illuminates how students build functional systems from institutional ruins. Posts demonstrate repair work through persistent waitlist navigation—”check regularly. no one behind you on the wait list will have access ahead of you unless you stop checking”—including email templates for professor outreach that transform institutional barriers into navigable systems through continuous monitoring.

Students innovate sophisticated repair strategies: building web tools scraping teacher evaluation data after institutional systems fail, navigating broken advising systems as immigrant students, and revealing hidden nursing program pathways as alternative routes around gatekeeping barriers. These examples show repair as infrastructure construction rather than temporary fixes, with students creating the functional systems institutions fail to provide. Reddit becomes a site of continuous maintenance where each solved registration problem, shared food resource, or mental health support thread represents infrastructure work by users rather than institutions.

danah boyd’s networked publics framework (2010) reveals Reddit’s affordances as infrastructure enabling crisis response impossible through ephemeral platforms. Persistence means solutions remain accessible across years: Baruch posts preserve campus lore from years ago, posts share decades-old success stories, documentation tracks balance persistence from 2020-2024, and posts promote CUNY Reconnect program for returning students. Replicability enables tactical knowledge designed for copying and adaptation, including 5-step shopping cart strategies with explicit reproduction instructions, comprehensive financial survival guides, step-by-step plagiarism defenses using Google Docs version history, and multi-step first-generation college guidance, all structured as copy-paste templates. Scalability makes individual experiences visible as systemic patterns: posts observe “Everyone and their mother wants to major in computer science,” revealing individual major choice as system-wide phenomenon; declarations that “majority of CUNY cooked” make personal SNAP/Pell dependency into recognized collective condition; notes that “Alot of people do not graduate ‘on time’” normalize degree completion delays at population scale. Searchability creates institutional memory accessible when students need it rather than when administrators schedule information sessions; students actively use Reddit search to find past solutions, discovering tactical knowledge through subreddit archives that preserve answers to questions about campus life.

1.3.4 Platform Studies and Reddit Research

Casey Fiesler’s work on Reddit’s “ecosystem of governance” (2018) provides a framework for understanding how CUNY communities self-regulate through moderation, community norms, and collective enforcement, creating what Fiesler calls “laboratories for governance innovation” where each campus community develops distinct norms while sharing platform affordances.

Evidence shows sophisticated self-governance through emergent community standards enforced via collective action and visible through upvoting patterns: communities protect medical privacy dignity, coordinate collective phishing detection and security literacy, establish norms for reporting professorial misconduct, and create informal security networks for campus safety.

Nicholas Proferes’ systematic review of Reddit research (2021) identifies key platform characteristics shaping knowledge production: pseudonymity enabling vulnerable disclosures, karma systems validating expertise, and threaded discussions preserving institutional memory. For CUNY students, these affordances shift Reddit from social media into educational infrastructure. Pseudonymity creates conditions for honest disclosure impossible under real names. Professors use throwaway accounts for vulnerable pedagogy questions. Posts document defenses against false cheating accusations requiring anonymity. Posts share admission rejection vulnerability. Users explicitly choose Reddit over Facebook for privacy when discussing sensitive campus issues. The platform’s anonymity enables participants to seek help and share struggles that institutional surveillance would inhibit.

High scores mark community-recognized knowledge authority. Posts validate academic crisis recovery expertise. Financial aid guides with dozens of comments establish authority. High-scored comments confirm TAP disbursement knowledge and validate work-study balance wisdom. Karma becomes a proxy for trustworthiness in decentralized knowledge systems, showing which guidance communities consider reliable.

Long threads become searchable knowledge repositories. Financial aid discussions with dozens of comments, multi-campus decision archives, nursing program navigation threads, and financial aid megathreads all function as living documents continuously updated through community contributions. These threaded structures preserve not just final answers but the collaborative process through which communities arrive at solutions.

Joseph Reagle’s work on disguising Reddit sources (2022) and Amy Bruckman’s “amateur artist” framework (2002) address ethical tensions in making visible what users may consider contextually private. [Added 2025-01-24] Tiago Rocha-Silva and colleagues’ “passive data collection” approach for Reddit (2023) provides practical framework for ethical collection while respecting community norms.

These ethical tensions manifest in CUNY data: posts memorializing suicides raise profound questions about researching grief despite public posting. Posts warn about “Rate my schedule” self-doxxing risks, showing sophisticated privacy literacy. Professors conceal identities for honest institutional feedback, revealing power dynamics requiring anonymity. Disclosures of profound loneliness appear deeply vulnerable despite technical publicity. These examples demonstrate that public platform data isn’t automatically ethical to analyze. Contextual integrity (Nissenbaum) demands understanding what users expect when posting, not merely what terms of service permit. This shapes our evidence-anchoring protocol: preserving specific contributions while protecting vulnerable community members through careful contextualization and avoiding extraction of trauma narratives for analytical convenience.

1.3.5 Educational Theory and Digital Resistance

Michel de Certeau’s distinction between institutional strategies and user tactics (1984) provides analytical framework for understanding how CUNY students navigate bureaucratic power. Institutional strategies operate through temporal and procedural control mechanisms: posts document funding freezes creating artificial scarcity and temporal pressure, detail enrollment appointment systems creating hierarchical access by seniority, explain priority registration mechanisms favoring certain student categories, describe major-restricted spaces limiting cross-disciplinary exploration, and report class cancellations from adjunct layoffs forcing last-minute schedule changes.

Student tactics constitute creative resistance and workarounds: Shopping cart exploits appear in multi-platform Coursicle coordination and swap strategies. ePermit arbitrage surfaces in posts assuming shared system knowledge and documenting cross-institutional navigation. Persistent waitlist monitoring circulates through email templates and timing strategies. Strategic absence management appears in posts navigating attendance policies. Bureaucratic appeals function as tactical resources framing complaints effectively.

The linguistic marker “won’t be able to” signals structural rather than individual barriers. Posts use “can’t afford” marking economic impossibility, frame gendered structural constraints with “won’t be able to,” describe transfer student barriers, and explain “cannot” participate in mandatory fee services. This framing appears across economic, temporal, and bureaucratic contexts, marking systematic barriers requiring tactical navigation rather than individual failure (detailed analysis in Chapter 3, Section 3.2).

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of “study” in the undercommons (where learning happens despite institutions, 2013) illuminates Reddit as fugitive planning space. Their notion of “debt” (what we owe each other, not institutions) explains mutual aid dynamics in crisis threads. Textbook piracy and resource sharing demonstrate collective resistance to extraction: satirical “sites to avoid” guides achieve massive community support, posts coordinate comprehensive resource sharing, and posts celebrate “how it feels to find your textbook pdf for free only for the professor to assign homework through Cengage.” These posts frame piracy not as individual theft but collective refusal of textbook market exploitation.

Peer-to-peer educational navigation bypasses institutional mediation: posts direct students to “MIT edX, Coursera, or Udemy” when stuck with bad professors, students create Brightspace tutorials institutions fail to provide, and posts articulate alternative career imaginations outside credential economy. This is “study” in Harney and Moten’s sense, learning collectively organized against institutional capture.

Mutual aid as obligation reveals what students owe each other: posts recognize care in hostile environments, express solidarity with system disruptors, and show gratitude for tactical knowledge sharing. These exchanges constitute Reddit as undercommons, the space where students create education despite rather than through CUNY’s institutional apparatus. The “debt” students acknowledge isn’t to the university charging tuition but to peers sharing survival strategies.

1.3.6 Research Ethics and Digital Methods

Helen Nissenbaum’s privacy framework of contextual integrity (2004, 2010) guides ethical approach;what’s public on Reddit may still violate contextual expectations when extracted for research. This shapes our methodology: preserving context while analyzing patterns.

The CARE Principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) for Indigenous data governance (Carroll et al. 2020), while developed for Indigenous contexts, offer framework for community-centered research ethics. Applied to CUNY Reddit: ensuring research benefits communities studied, recognizing community authority over their narratives, researcher responsibility to accuracy, and ethical representation of vulnerable populations.

Solon Barocas and Helen Nissenbaum’s critique of big data’s “end run around anonymity and consent” (2014) applies to Reddit research. Kate Crawford and danah boyd’s “critical questions for big data” framework (2012) challenges assumptions about objectivity in computational analysis of community discourse. [Added 2025-01-24] Michelle Meyer and colleagues’ call for “enhancing ethics of user-sourced online data” (Nature Computational Science, 2023) and Jakob Demant and Alessandro Moretti’s “situated, structured approach” for netnographic research in closed online communities (2024) provide contemporary frameworks for navigating public-private boundaries in Reddit research.

1.3.7 Synthesis: Toward Ethnographic Infrastructure Studies

This theoretical framework synthesizes digital ethnography, platform studies, critical infrastructure theory, and educational resistance to understand Reddit as vernacular infrastructure. Following Barendregt and Pink, Reddit’s digital discourse has physical dependencies and consequences. Per Garfinkel and Markham, how we study shapes what we find. Following Clifford and Fiesler, knowledge production happens through collective processes. Per Jackson and Gilmore, systems work through human maintenance against institutional abandonment. Per boyd and Proferes, affordances enable certain forms of collective action. Per de Certeau and Harney/Moten, student workarounds expose institutional failures. Per Nissenbaum and Bruckman, public data isn’t automatically ethical to analyze.

1.4 Research Design: Methodology and Data Collection (3,000 words)

1.4.1 The Data Collection Challenge

The research questions driving this study (how CUNY’s digital communities responded to systematic institutional crises, how students constructed educational infrastructure through peer networks, how platform architectures shaped crisis resilience) required methodological approaches capable of capturing both longitudinal patterns and marginalized voices. Conventional Reddit data collection methods face an insurmountable limitation: the platform’s API restricts access to 1,000 items per query, creating severe temporal bias toward recent content while systematically excluding historical depth and crisis-driven participation patterns analyzed throughout this chapter.

The solution developed here inverts conventional approaches by sampling users rather than posts, then reconstructing complete participation histories through network-driven discovery (detailed methodology in Chapter 2, Section 2.1). This user-centric scraping methodology enabled collection of 273,702 CUNY posts across 8 subreddit databases spanning 2011-2025, with comparative datasets from NYU (174,396 posts), Columbia (97,797 posts), and additional institutions. The 14-year temporal depth proved essential for distinguishing pandemic-era changes from longer-term patterns. The pre-pandemic baseline analysis in Section 1.2.3.B required complete 2018-2019 archives, while intensification ratios in Section 1.2.3.C demanded comprehensive before/after comparison that conventional methods cannot provide.

Critically, this methodology captures participation patterns invisible to standard approaches: the one-time crisis posters who seek help then vanish, the late-night support networks operating when institutions close, the tactical knowledge shared across years that conventional sampling misses entirely. Data validation revealed that conventional methods would have systematically excluded nearly half of Baruch’s discourse: 39,198 orphaned comments representing crisis-driven participation from students who posted once and disappeared, likely either resolving acute problems or abandoning enrollment (full technical treatment in Chapter 2, Section 2.1.2).

1.4.2 Evidence Anchoring Protocol

This dissertation employs evidence anchoring as both methodological rigor and ethical practice. Every empirical claim traces to specific Reddit posts identified by submission_XXXXX or comment_XXXXX format, enabling readers to verify interpretations against original discourse while preserving attribution. For example, Section 1.2.2’s documentation of pre-pandemic tactical knowledge links directly to shopping cart strategies, ePermit arbitrage, and credit threshold management. Each ID represents a verifiable post with community validation indicated by engagement scores.

This protocol transforms computational text analysis into reproducible qualitative research: the 216 food insecurity posts analyzed in Chapter 3 maintain full citation chains, financial aid discussions preserve exact discourse context, and pattern claims link to SQL queries documented in analysis reports. The approach addresses long-standing tensions in digital research ethics (Reagle 2022; Bruckman 2002) by treating publicly posted Reddit content as published discourse while maintaining contextual integrity (Nissenbaum 2004, 2010). Evidence anchoring preserves human voices within big data, preventing the abstraction that transforms student testimonies into mere data points while enabling the verification standards academic scholarship demands.

1.4.3 Analytical Framework

The dissertation employs three nested scales of analysis, each building on the others while maintaining distinct methodological approaches. Macroscopic computational analysis (Chapter 2) examines architectural patterns, temporal dynamics, and linguistic differentials across the full corpus, revealing how CUNY’s federated 8-subreddit structure achieved 94.6% crisis response rates versus NYU’s 86.8%, how discourse intensified through 12.9x-29.4x ratios across crisis topics, and how impossibility grammar (“won’t be able to,” “have to go in person”) appeared 1.60x-16.37x more frequently at CUNY than elite institutions. This macroscopic level identifies patterns requiring explanation.

Mesoscopic network analysis examines information flows, community bonds, and response mechanisms, documenting CUNY’s 0.34 network density (3x Reddit baseline), analyzing 9,782 transit discussions revealing mobility constraints, and mapping how tactical knowledge circulates across campus boundaries. This intermediate scale bridges computational patterns and lived experience.

Microscopic ethnographic analysis (Chapter 3) grounds quantitative patterns in individual testimonies, tactical innovations, and survival strategies, showing how students navigate food insecurity through peer networks, construct vernacular infrastructure to circumvent institutional barriers, and maintain 24/7 support systems when administrative offices close. This testimonial level reveals the human stakes of computational patterns, demonstrating that the 290% March 2020 activity spike represented not platform discovery but desperate collective sense-making when institutions failed students at their moment of greatest need.

Together, these three scales enable the dissertation’s central argument: Reddit-participating students supplemented formal CUNY education by creating parallel learning networks through distributed peer support systems, often filling gaps where institutional resources proved insufficient. The methodological innovation lies not merely in technical data collection but in analytical integration, showing how computational patterns gain meaning only when grounded in lived experience, while individual testimonies reveal systematic structures only when analyzed at scale.

1.5 Chapter Overview (1,000 words)

1.5.1 Primary Findings

CUNY’s federated Reddit architecture (born from institutional neglect) inadvertently creates effective crisis response through distributed expertise, as evidenced by cross-campus knowledge sharing and parallel support systems during outages, preventing overload while fostering campus-specific tactical knowledge.

1.5.2 Dissertation Structure

Pre-pandemic “normal” was already crisis (this chapter)
Computational patterns reveal systematic inequality (Chapter 2)
Lived experiences show survival strategies (Chapter 3)
Reddit-participating students create supplementary education networks alongside formal structures

1.5.3 Contributions to Scholarship

For platform studies: Architecture shapes crisis response capability
For digital humanities: New methods for capturing marginalized voices
For higher education: Vernacular infrastructure as functional educational infrastructure: peer tutoring networks, resource sharing systems, and 24/7 support mechanisms
For public policy: The implications of reduced institutional support patterns

Transition to Chapter 2

“Having established the institutional context and theoretical framework for understanding CUNY’s digital communities, we now turn to the macroscopic computational analysis that reveals the systematic patterns underlying these spaces of crisis and care…”

Key Revisions from Previous Outline

Opening: Now starts with March 2020 crisis moment, not methodological discovery
Context Before Method: Institutional context and theory come before explaining data collection
Orphan Comments: Moved to Chapter 2 where it makes sense methodologically
Evidence Flow: Pre-pandemic baseline consolidated in 1.2.2, referenced elsewhere
Narrative Logic: Crisis -> Context -> Theory -> Method -> Preview

Implementation Notes

Total target: 14,000-15,000 words
Each evidence ID appears in ONE primary location
Cross-references use section numbers, not repetition
Transitions connect sections without redundancy

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