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

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,  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.