Living stories one day at a time: Recovery storytelling in online communities of practice
Abstract
Recovery is an on-going, socially constructed practice that is “done” by individuals through storytelling. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and explain how members of an online community of practice –r/stropdrinking (r/SD)– normalize recovery by crafting and enacting a recovery identity through recovery storytelling in a stigma-laden world with others. The aim of this thesis is to make sense of how self-described disordered drinkers “do” recovery in online communities of practice (CoP). I argue that alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a disorder of a person in social context, and that storytelling is the process through which recovery is enacted in the world. For data collection and analysis, I applied an autoethnographic storytelling approach. Three processes of recovery storytelling emerged: (re)storying, (re)forming, and (re)learning. These aspects are mutually interdependent and make up a recovery helix that must be nurtured through storytelling. CoP is also described as helical, made up of engagement, imagination, and alignment. These helixes work together to when people “do” recovery online, and are helpful models to unpack how recovery is done in concert with others. This thesis provides an alternative narrative about the lived experience of AUD recovery in pursuit of dismantling stigma. By telling stories about AUD recovery, I am promoting help-seeking and manifesting a social context that responds to AUD with compassionate concern.
Description
Keywords
Mass Communications
Citation
Hedges, A. (2017). Living stories one day at a time: Recovery storytelling in online communities of practice (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26777