Chapter 1: Introduction, Context, and Literature Review

Establishing Pre-Pandemic Baseline and Theoretical Framework

6821 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 exploded by 290%. But this wasn’t the beginning of crisis. It was the moment when previously undocumented struggles became visible in digital discourse. Among Reddit-participating CUNY students, the shift from 929 posts in the main subreddit pre-pandemic to 91,505 post-pandemic represents not new problems but newly collective recognition within this digitally-engaged subset of what students had been navigating alone for years. A single post from February 12, 2020 (c_fhdvsyc) captures the structural conditions that would intensify during the pandemic: a Queens College computer science student documented their department at “over maximum capacity,” adjuncts making “$20k-25k,” and students relying on Chegg servers and ePermit workarounds to manage institutional precarity weeks before COVID-19 forced these crises into visibility.

These material conditions reflect what scholars call “austerity blues”: the systematic disinvestment in public higher education that has characterized CUNY’s history since the 1970s fiscal crisis. As Brier and Fabricant (2016) document, public universities have experienced decades of state budget cuts translated into student costs, adjunctification of labor, and the erosion of social safety nets. This analysis connects to Newfield’s broader institutional critique in The Great Mistake, which traces how wrecked public universities result from deliberate policy choices rather than inevitable economic forces. Harney and Moten’s (2013) concept of “study in the undercommons” becomes analytically useful here. What the February 2020 post captures is precisely this: students developing survival knowledge and tactical infrastructure outside institutional channels, creating what amounts to pedagogical self-organization in response to systematic underfunding. The shopping cart registration tricks, the ePermit workarounds, the peer navigation of financial aid systems: these emerge as vernacular responses to the neoliberal restructuring of public education.

1.1.2 Research Questions

Frame research questions emerging from crisis

Three intersecting questions guide this study, each probing different dimensions of how CUNY’s digital communities function as survival infrastructure.

First, how had students already built parallel educational infrastructure through Reddit before the pandemic? This question treats Reddit-based student communities as existing survival infrastructure that pre-dated COVID-19. The tactical knowledge about registration, financial aid navigation, and course selection circulating on CUNY subreddits represents collective knowledge work by students managing the complexity and inadequacy of official institutional systems. By examining pre-pandemic Reddit discourse, we document how students had already engineered solutions to structural problems, knowledge that would prove crucial when institutions moved online unexpectedly.

Second, how do we interpret posts like “i won’t even have a house to live under or food to eat” (comment_m9mrjqz) appearing not during COVID but in response to federal aid changes? This question asks how we understand expressions of material precarity that appear in relation to policy decisions rather than pandemic shock. Similar expressions of housing and food insecurity (comment_m9mqm92, score: 183; comment_mbdd4my, score: 97) suggest that what emerged visibly during COVID-19 actually reflects ongoing conditions shaped by austerity, adjunctification, and inadequate financial aid. The question invites us to recognize that crisis was not created by the pandemic but rather made visible and intensified by it.

When March 2020 hit, these existing communities became crisis infrastructure, providing tactical knowledge, resource sharing, and peer support when institutions closed. The activity spike (290% in CUNY communities) revealed not new problems but newly urgent collective sense-making. What persists beyond the acute crisis moment, however, is the lingering and growing community itself. Even as remote learning normalized and institutions reopened, these Reddit communities continued to expand, develop deeper expertise, and sustain peer support networks. This persistent engagement suggests something deeper than temporary crisis response.

Third, why did CUNY’s distributed 8-subreddit system enable this sustained community growth in ways that centralized institutional forums did not? This question investigates the architectural implications of decentralized versus centralized models. CUNY’s distributed architecture (r/CUNY, r/Baruch, r/HunterCollege, r/QueensCollege, r/JohnJayCollege, r/CityCollege, r/Brooklyn_College) enables campus-specific communities with horizontal knowledge sharing and multiple entry points, while NYU’s centralized forums funnel all discussion through single institutional channels. By examining how these communities sustained and expanded after the acute pandemic crisis passed, we can understand whether distributed systems better accommodate the temporal and emotional logics of peer support and whether they create conditions for communities to become self-sustaining rather than crisis-dependent.

1.1.3 Study Scope and Implications

Position the stakes

This dissertation examines 273,702 posts across 8 CUNY subreddit communities from 2011-2025, revealing how Reddit-participating students transform generic platform features into survival infrastructure. The January 2025 federal aid suspension (submission_1ic1a4p, 315 upvotes) triggering widespread concern among this digitally-engaged subset suggests these patterns extend beyond temporary pandemic adjustments to reflect ongoing challenges with institutional support systems.

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 maintains 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”: community-specific rules emerging from participant needs rather than administrative mandate. For CUNY students, this means r/Baruch, r/HunterCollege, and r/CUNY coexist as separate communities. 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 means content remains accessible across years. Searchability allows students to find solutions to crises posted long ago. Replicability enables tactical knowledge to be copied and adapted across campuses. Scalability extends peer support 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. It becomes searchable by future students facing similar crises. The knowledge can be replicated across CUNY campuses. 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. The platform’s value lies in how its specific affordances enable analytical perspectives that complement traditional methods. Reddit reveals certain patterns, temporalities, and collective processes that are 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. This enables analysis of how crisis response patterns evolved before, during, and after the pandemic without retrospective bias. Interviews require participants to reconstruct memory. Surveys prompt 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” (comment_m9mrjqz) at 1:36am on a Tuesday, that captures crisis temporality that scheduled research encounters cannot access.

The February 12, 2020 post documenting Queens College CS department overcrowding provides another example (comment_fhdvsyc). It details adjunct precarity and student reliance on Chegg and ePermit workarounds. Posted weeks before anyone knew COVID-19 would strike, it provides prophetic baseline evidence. This kind of documentation becomes impossible through post-pandemic interviews asking “what was normal before?”

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

Reddit’s upvoting mechanism provides built-in validity checking. Highly-scored posts demonstrate community recognition and agreement. When comment_lwoakv3 explaining ePermit navigation receives 54 upvotes (the highest score in the tactical knowledge dataset), this signals collective validation. The strategy works. The community considers it important. When submission_1ic1a4p about federal aid suspension panic garners 315 upvotes, those votes represent 315+ 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. Focus groups have researchers facilitating. Institutional surveys have administrators framing questions. Reddit threads document peer-to-peer knowledge construction, tactical development, and collective sense-making as they happen. The shopping cart registration trick exists as comment_ewlyuik. Midnight course monitoring strategies circulate. Financial aid navigation templates get shared. This tactical knowledge emerges from Reddit-participating students’ experimentation and circulates among digitally-engaged peer networks 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. This creates 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. These patterns reveal when students experience acute crises. They show 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. The platform shows when discourse actually occurs, not 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.

Interviews require researchers to ask questions. 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. This provides evidence of what actually matters in daily navigation of CUNY.

Reddit threads document iterative problem-solving as collective process. A student posts confusion about TAP requirements. Multiple peers contribute partial knowledge. Someone with experience clarifies. The thread becomes searchable resource for future students. This knowledge construction process becomes visible through threaded comments, timestamps, and edit histories. It shows how communities collectively develop expertise, not just that individuals possess it.

Students participating across multiple CUNY subreddits reveal comparative experiences. The same user posts 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. It shows how students experience the federated system’s distributed advantages and shared struggles.

Reddit preserves evidence of what doesn’t work. The crashed CUNYfirst servers get documented. The unreachable advisors get mentioned. The contradictory financial aid communications get preserved. The broken elevators trapping students get reported. Unlike institutional assessments that report 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. It systematically obscures individual experiences, causal mechanisms, and non-participating populations.

Reddit users represent self-selected subset of CUNY students. They possess 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. Reddit shows patterns among digitally-engaged students who choose platform participation. It doesn’t provide representative samples of all enrollees.

Reddit posts document what students choose to disclose. They don’t necessarily reveal what students experience. 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. It doesn’t directly reveal underlying realities.

Reddit posts lose embodied context. Facial expressions disappear. Tone of voice vanishes. 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.” Reddit preserves temporal context through timestamps. It maintains spatial context through campus affiliations. It 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. Correlation doesn’t establish causation. Why these patterns emerged remains unclear. Individual motivations driving participation stay hidden. Which interventions might prove effective can’t be determined. Platform data alone cannot answer these questions. Patterns demand explanation, which requires theoretical frameworks (Section 1.3) and complementary methods (ethnographic analysis in Chapter 3).

Reddit preserves what students post. It doesn’t capture silences between posts. Users vanish after crisis posts. 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, not absence. It shows participation, not non-participation. It reveals discourse, not 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. Ethnographic close reading (Chapter 3) provides that explanation by grounding patterns in individual testimonies. Together, these approaches enable what Pink et al. (2016) call “non-digital-centric” digital ethnography. They treat online discourse as embedded in material campus life rather than separate virtual domain.

Reddit’s methodological value lies precisely in showing what institutional research cannot. The after-hours support networks become visible. The tactical knowledge circulating outside official channels gets documented. The collective sense-making when institutions fail leaves traces. The temporal evolution of crisis discourse creates archives. The vernacular infrastructure students build despite rather than through administrative systems gets preserved. These patterns, processes, and practices become analytically visible through platform affordances. Persistence, searchability, scale, and community validation make them visible. They remain 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. comment_i2cshfi (Baruch, score: 60) 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: WhatsApp groups generate redundant questions (comment_hl9l8la), while crisis alerts spread across “here snapchat,Twitter,Instagram” (submission_1gvofdk, score: 78). comment_itwfhhb (score: 43) provides a 3,756-character guide navigating from Reddit to NYC.gov benefits systems, demonstrating multi-platform institutional navigation. Post-pandemic, student organizations maintain presence across Discord, GroupMe, and Reddit (submission_1icoevb), creating platform ecosystems rather than singular digital homes (see digital ethnography evidence for complete polymedia analysis).

Physical campus spaces reveal digital/material entanglement. submission_1foltjh (score: 182) documents phone calls disrupting library study spaces, while submission_1hrs6db (score: 152) captures noise complaints showing how noise-cancelling headphones create contested boundaries between digital bubbles and physical presence. Students discover institutional resources through Reddit rather than official channels: submission_1ioxl7d (score: 140) celebrates finding free WSJ/NYT access, revealing Reddit as shadow IT support system. Barendregt’s critique of “dematerialized” digital technologies proves essential;Reddit depends on server farms, campus WiFi (submission_1hh93ys: “No working internet and we’re still expected to take finals??”), 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. High-scoring posts make collective values visible: comment_m2993e6 (score: 224) defending CUNY becomes the highest-validated institutional pride statement, comment_mf5zmc7 (score: 198) enforces academic freedom norms, comment_m9mqm92 (score: 183) recognizes shared financial vulnerability, and comment_mn6ijjb (score: 181) corrects social norms through community enforcement. These scores don’t merely reflect popularity;they accomplish accountability by making community standards publicly measurable (see ethnomethodological evidence for complete validation analysis).

The concept of “indexicality” (context-dependent meaning) explains how tactical knowledge becomes comprehensible only within CUNY’s specific bureaucratic culture. comment_ewlyuik (Baruch, score: 11) demonstrates this with its 5-step Coursicle strategy: “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 comment_h6uf0nc’s swap strategy, comment_lwoakv3 (score: 54) assuming shared ePermit expertise, and comment_mxuh7mk’s bookmark trick 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. thread t3_1hqkkh0 (150 comments) serves as living BMCC nursing program guide updated each semester, thread t3_1akbu5y (60 comments, score: 623) coordinates academic advisor crisis response, and thread t3_1j6449l (75 comments) troubleshoots Baruch 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. comment_fhdvsyc (QueensCollege, score: 21, February 2020) provides 7,649 characters of 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: submission_xe5dwk (Hunter) catalogs “broken elevators, dirty asf…worst campus ever,” submission_1hh93ys (Baruch, score: 199) reports “No working internet and we’re still expected to take finals??”, submission_1hbae48 (Queens) documents financial aid owing student $3,000 with semester nearly over, and comment_ipdhvy8 (Hunter) asks “Why do none of the water fountains work? Giant holes in the wall” (see critical infrastructure evidence for complete abandonment documentation). 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. comment_lefsdw7 (CUNY, 3,153 characters) demonstrates 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.” The post includes email template for professor outreach, transforming institutional barrier into navigable system through continuous monitoring.

Students innovate sophisticated repair strategies: submission_jm4ahe (score: 194) documents a student building a web tool scraping teacher evaluation data after institutional systems fail, submission_1kntyfv (score: 237) chronicles immigrant student navigating broken advising systems, and submission_1kp8qyh reveals hidden nursing program pathways as alternative routes around gatekeeping barriers. These examples show repair not as temporary fixes but as infrastructure construction, with students creating the functional systems institutions fail to provide (see Jackson repair evidence Section 2). Reddit becomes 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 (see boyd affordances analysis for complete documentation):

Persistence: Solutions remain accessible across years. comment_koxv1co (Baruch, score: 51) preserves campus lore from “a few years ago,” comment_mn6abxk (CUNY, score: 135) shares 20-year-old success story of meeting spouse at Hunter, and comment_mcf39dr documents balance persistence from 2020-2024. comment_ksab2yr promotes CUNY Reconnect program for returning students, showing multi-year institutional memory preservation.
Replicability: Tactical knowledge designed for copying and adaptation. comment_ewlyuik’s 5-step shopping cart strategy provides explicit reproduction instructions, comment_itwfhhb (3,756 characters) offers comprehensive financial survival guide, comment_ke4h1ml details step-by-step plagiarism defense using Google Docs version history, and comment_krbu6n9 provides multi-step first-generation college guidance, all structured as copy-paste templates.
Scalability: Individual experiences reveal systemic patterns. comment_lo92u7q (CUNY, score: 95) “Everyone and their mother wants to major in computer science” makes individual major choice visible as system-wide pattern, comment_m9mqm92 (score: 183) “majority of CUNY cooked” transforms personal SNAP/Pell dependency into recognized collective condition, and comment_mcdyjks “Alot of people do not graduate ‘on time’” normalizes degree completion delays at population scale.
Searchability: Students actively use Reddit search to find past solutions. comment_m9u60o2 describes “trying to find out how to join every club,” comment_jb2lv17 recounts “fought for my life trying to find a bathroom,” and multiple posts document discovering tactical knowledge through subreddit search, creating institutional memory accessible when students need it rather than when administrators schedule information sessions.

1.3.4 Platform Studies and Reddit Research

Casey Fiesler’s work on Reddit’s “ecosystem of governance” (2018) provides framework for understanding how CUNY communities self-regulate through moderation, community norms, and collective enforcement. The 8-subreddit structure creates what Fiesler calls “laboratories for governance innovation” (each campus community developing distinct norms while sharing platform affordances).

Evidence shows sophisticated self-governance: comment_ljsi5h9 (score: 153) demonstrates community protecting medical privacy dignity, comment_l2wt74u coordinates collective phishing detection and security literacy, comment_esv2tm1 establishes norms for reporting professorial misconduct, and comment_lrbs6pj creates informal security networks for campus safety. These aren’t top-down rules but emergent community standards enforced through collective action and visible through upvoting patterns.

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, these affordances transform Reddit from social media into educational infrastructure.

Submission_j1ybnj (score: 54) shows professor using throwaway account for vulnerable pedagogy questions, submission_k0fj3e documents defense against false cheating accusation requiring anonymity, submission_1e410p8 shares admission rejection vulnerability, and submission_abnmyj explicitly chooses Reddit over Facebook for privacy when discussing sensitive campus issues. Pseudonymity creates conditions for honest disclosure impossible under real names.

High scores mark community-recognized knowledge authority. submission_1akbu5y (score: 631!) validates academic crisis recovery expertise, submission_x94w0o (score: 127, 52 comments) establishes financial aid guide authority, comment_m92tnli (score: 29) confirms TAP disbursement knowledge, and comment_mypck5x (score: 49) validates work-study balance wisdom. Karma becomes proxy for trustworthiness in decentralized knowledge systems.

Long threads become searchable knowledge repositories. submission_x94w0o’s 52-comment financial aid discussion, submission_1ilftn3’s 33-comment multi-campus decision archive, submission_1f4hykx’s 32-comment nursing program navigation, and submission_19aovet’s 27-comment financial aid megathread all function as living documents continuously updated through community contributions (see platform studies evidence for complete analysis).

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: submission_1j6xle9 (score: 512) memorializes a sister’s suicide, raising profound questions about researching grief despite public posting. submission_1m5gr7z (score: 339) warns about “Rate my schedule” posts as self-doxxing risks, showing sophisticated privacy literacy. submission_1hevgne documents professor concealing identity for honest institutional feedback, revealing power dynamics requiring anonymity. submission_1iwsc4d (score: 190) discloses profound loneliness, 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 (see de Certeau evidence for complete tactical/strategic analysis). Institutional strategies operate through temporal and procedural control mechanisms: submission_1id479g (score: 256) documents funding freezes creating artificial scarcity and temporal pressure, comment_ga7w8kj (score: 17) details enrollment appointment system creating hierarchical access by seniority, comment_m4jqlak (score: 16) explains priority registration mechanisms favoring certain student categories, comment_kk7l56k (score: 8) describes major-restricted spaces limiting cross-disciplinary exploration, and comment_hucuiuc (score: 15) reports class cancellations from adjunct layoffs forcing last-minute schedule changes.

Student tactics constitute creative resistance and workarounds: Shopping cart exploits appear in comment_ewlyuik’s multi-platform Coursicle coordination and comment_h6uf0nc’s swap strategy. ePermit arbitrage surfaces in comment_lwoakv3 (score: 54) assuming shared system knowledge and comment_mrnfhk9 (score: 25) documenting cross-institutional navigation. Persistent waitlist monitoring circulates through comment_lefsdw7’s email templates and timing strategies. Strategic absence management appears in comment_mfzamrf (score: 27) navigating attendance policies. Bureaucratic appeals function as tactical resource in comment_gdhsxax (score: 13) framing complaints effectively.

The linguistic marker “won’t be able to” signals structural rather than individual barriers. comment_mbdd4my (score: 97) uses “can’t afford” marking economic impossibility, comment_loqr80z (score: 55) frames gendered structural constraints with “won’t be able to,” comment_jvbhn01 (score: 26) describes transfer student barriers, and comment_jh6pezk (score: 43) explains “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: submission_1my4vi6 (score: 585!) provides satirical “sites to avoid” guide achieving massive community support, submission_iefxlt (score: 161) coordinates comprehensive resource sharing, and submission_1i8gtgt (score: 213) celebrates “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: comment_fhdvsyc directs students to “MIT edX, Coursera, or Udemy” when stuck with bad professors, comment_m9xp3x8 (score: 33) shows students creating Brightspace tutorials institutions fail to provide, and comment_mbjad4x (score: 120) articulates 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: comment_m26nqzc (score: 66) recognizes care in hostile environment, comment_k2cvjmh (score: 39) expresses solidarity with system disruptors, and comment_m83p8rp (score: 45) shows gratitude for tactical knowledge sharing (see undercommons evidence Section 3). 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 comment_ewlyuik (shopping cart strategy), comment_lwoakv3 (ePermit arbitrage, score: 54), and comment_n1ztg1q (credit threshold management, score: 25). 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 (comment_lwoakv3, score: 54; comment_ewlyuik; comment_lefsdw7) and parallel support systems during outages (submission_1hh93ys, score: 199; submission_1gvofdk, score: 78), 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 (comment_fhdvsyc), resource sharing systems (submission_1my4vi6, score: 585), 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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