Narrative Communities

Narrative communities are groups of people who share interpretive frameworks — common stories, metaphors, precedents, and conceptual vocabularies — through which they make sense of experience and coordinate meaning. The concept bridges sociology of knowledge, hermeneutics, and epistemic justice theory: narrative communities are the social substrate in which hermeneutic resources are generated, contested, and transmitted.

A narrative community that is systematically excluded from public discourse — from academic journals, legal language, journalism, and official history — generates concepts and interpretive tools that remain local, untranslated, and invisible to the broader epistemic commons. The concepts that do enter shared discourse are necessarily those generated by communities with institutional access. This dynamic explains why hermeneutical injustice is not a series of accidents but a structural feature of any knowledge system built on unequal access to conceptual labor.