How communities make sense of crisis, and how they last

I use qualitative and ethnographic methods to study information behavior in online communities: how people find what they need, how leadership emerges, and how knowledge spreads across platforms.

Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, October 2026

The Building of TM‑Connect: Digital Knowledge Infrastructure, Distributed Leadership Roles, and Sensemaking During the Pandemic and Beyond

When the COVID-19 pandemic ended in-person group meditation in March 2020, members of the Transcendental Meditation community built TM‑Connect: twice-daily led sessions on Zoom, plus a Facebook group for reflection, discussion, and a lasting record of each session. Drawing on twelve semi-structured interviews and a content analysis of 254 Facebook posts, and guided by Dervin's Sense-Making, Weick's sensemaking, and Mamykina's collective sensemaking, this study asks how a community formed in crisis creates meaning and sustains itself over time.

Members bridged knowledge gaps through fully passive gap-bridging: they resolved needs they had not yet recognized through information they came across without seeking it. Facebook looked like the community's hub, but Zoom was its emotional and spiritual core, with Facebook extending and preserving that connection. Four interdependent leadership roles kept practice, connection, and knowledge going across both platforms, which let a crisis-formed community outlast the crisis that created it.

Directors: Marie L. Radford and Jeffrey Lane
Committee: Tawfiq Ammari, Kaitlin Costello, Estelle Smith
Methods: Digital ethnography, Semi-structured interviews (n = 12), Content analysis (254 posts), Co-coding with intercoder reliability

Four phases, 2020 to 2025

TM‑Connect moved from emergency response to a lasting community. Each phase changed how members found and shared knowledge.

1
March 2020
Crisis formation
Lockdowns end in-person group meditation, and Bob Roth begins leading twice-daily sessions on Zoom.
2
2020–2021
Early adaptation
Members learn the platforms together, and Facebook becomes a space for collective troubleshooting.
3
2021–2023
Stabilization
A collective identity forms, and members use both platforms with growing sophistication.
4
2023–2025
Sustained engagement
The community outlasts the crisis, welcoming new members while honoring its history.

Four roles that kept it going

No single leader sustained the community. Four interdependent roles shared the work of practice, connection, and knowledge.

Leader, knowledge bridge, and community anchor

Leads the twice-daily sessions and stays reachable, often answering members’ emails himself.

Visual storyteller and knowledge archivist

Posts each session’s quotes, poems, and teachings to Facebook within minutes, each paired with a chosen image.

Technical infrastructure and community enabler

Runs the servers and Zoom setup behind sessions with thousands of participants, and keeps members informed when problems arise.

Community administrator and group moderator

Approves new members and posts, keeping the group civil and screening out bad actors and bots.

Contributions

The TM‑Connect Persistence Model

Explains how a community formed in crisis sustains itself after the crisis ends.

Theory

Extends Dervin's Sense-Making to social media and algorithmic feeds, and extends Mamykina et al.'s collective sensemaking to a single sustained contributor and to sensemaking across platforms.

Method

A modified scrolling-back technique with participant-guided sampling for studying the history of online communities.

Practice

A model for online wellness and spiritual communities, and guidance for community administrators and platform designers on integrating platforms.

Earlier work

Before the dissertation, my work with Marie Radford and Vivek Singh looked at how everyday information technologies shape what people know and how they feel: how Google Autocomplete spread COVID-19 conspiracy theories across 76 countries, how mindfulness meditation apps can buffer workplace technostress and information overload, and how children use intelligent personal assistants such as Alexa.

Sense-making and sensemaking
Information behavior in crisis
Online communities
Digital knowledge infrastructure
Distributed leadership
Cross-platform social media
Digital wellness and contemplative practice
Digital ethnography
Intelligent personal assistants
Search algorithms and misinformation
Explainable and generative AI