How We Learn Who We Are: An Oral History of Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous

By Lily Doron

Below are selected excerpts from Lily Doron’s OHMA thesis, How We Learn Who We Are: An Oral History of Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous. To read the full work, please contact the author at lilypdoron@gmail.com.

*Contact Lily if you would like to read the full thesis.

Lily Doron is an oral historian, audio and podcast producer, curator, and storyteller. She graduated from Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program in 2021. Previously, she earned a B.A. in ethics, human rights, and documentary studies from Duke University. She is interested in mobilizing personal narratives for social justice and community-building.

For two years, Lily produced and edited Wavemaker Conversations: A Podcast for the Insanely Curious, an interview-based podcast featuring pioneers in diverse fields that aimed for a personal and in-depth perspective on current events. At Wavemaker, Lily participated in all aspects of production, from brainstorming ideas and conducting background research, to liaising with guests, transcribing interviews, and editing the audio to piece each episode together. She also crafted promotional materials for social media. Her favorite part of the job, and greatest contribution, was finding the heart of the interview and crafting a story around it.

Lily has completed a range of multimedia oral history projects centered on human rights issues. For example, for her undergraduate thesis, she researched the 2015/2016 refugee influx into Europe. She interviewed aid workers and migrants across six countries from Greece to Germany, then created an exhibit featuring their stories. The exhibit included audio, photographs, graphics, and text. Lily’s goal was to share the lived realities of individual refugees, to both educate the community on refugee policy and treatment, and to serve as a counterpoint to the negative rhetoric about migrants.

Lily’s projects have ranged from refugee migration, to nietos recuperados (infants kidnapped by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s), to the fight for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, to beekeeping. She has also collaborated with non-profit organizations on public history projects exploring conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, refugee resettlement, and more. Her OHMA thesis examined how storytelling practices in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) impact AA members’ self-understanding and adoption of the alcoholic identity.

Lily is currently completing a research fellowship assisting with an oral history of the Human Rights Campaign’s 40-year fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights. She is from Durham, North Carolina, and enjoys traveling, cooking, listening to audio documentaries, and playing ultimate Frisbee.