r/expertparents: Science, Biopolitics, and Expertise on Reddit

<p class="p1">This thesis examines Reddit parenting communities as sites of informal health knowledge production, situating contemporary digital health practices within longer histories of institutional transformation and shifting patient-provider relationships. Drawing on a computational dataset of Reddit comments from r/NewParents and r/BabyLedWeaning (2020-2022) and ethnographic observation of r/ScienceBasedParenting (2023-2026), I argue that parents engage in a practice I term DIY research, collective interpretation of medical claims through peer networks, scientific evidence, and experiential knowledge,<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp; </span>as a response to both the expansion of available health information and the contraction of institutional reliability. The adoption of patient-centered care models in the mid-twentieth century marked a structural shift away from medical paternalism, redistributing interpretive responsibility onto patients. Today, under conditions of political instability, reduced social welfare, and the intensification of parenting culture, this responsibility has deepened: parents are expected to seek, assess, and act on medical knowledge as a moral obligation. Situating these practices within frameworks of biomedicalization and post-normal science, I demonstrate that in Reddit communities, parents collectively negotiate institutional trust, construct scientific identities, and develop agency through situated knowledge. The selective trust parents extend to institutions - scrutinizing politically compromised research while maintaining commitment to scientific consensus - reflects not an anti-science disposition but a reorganization of epistemic authority produced by institutional instability. This has particular significance in a moment where the conditions of post-normal science increasingly characterize everyday parenting decisions.