An evolving bibliography

Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old

William L. Randall & Gary Kenyon

Randall’s articulation of narrative intelligence as the capacities involved in composing and understanding a life narratively. A foundational predecessor to this framework.

Narrative Intelligence

Michael Mateas & Phoebe Sengers (eds.)

A wide-ranging collection treating narrative intelligence in computational, cognitive, and design contexts. Distinct from the human-centered framework proposed here, but part of the term’s history.

Time and Narrative / Oneself as Another

Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur’s work on how narrative mediates temporality, action, and identity. His question—how we become who we are through the stories we tell about ourselves—runs beneath the identity dimension of the framework.

Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct

Theodore R. Sarbin

Sarbin advanced narrative as a root metaphor for understanding human conduct, helping establish story as a serious mode of psychological inquiry.

The Narrative Construction of Reality

Jerome S. Bruner

Bruner examined narrative as a distinctive way human beings organize experience, construct meaning, and participate in culture.

Narrative Identity

Dan P. McAdams & Kate C. McLean

McAdams and McLean study how people construct evolving life stories that connect memory, identity, meaning, and imagined futures.

Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends

Michael White & David Epston

White and Epston developed practices for externalizing problems and re-authoring identity through narrative. Their work informs the framework’s attention to how stories become inhabited and how they can be reworked.

Sensemaking in Organizations

Karl E. Weick

Weick describes how people and organizations create plausible meaning from ambiguity—and how that meaning guides ongoing action.

Public Narrative

Marshall Ganz

Ganz’s work on public narrative links personal story, collective identity, and shared action. It asks who gets to author the narratives that become authoritative in communities and movements.

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson

Lakoff and Johnson showed how metaphor structures everyday concepts, perception, and reasoning, often outside conscious attention.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Steven C. Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, Kelly G. Wilson

ACT research illuminates how awareness, acceptance, cognitive flexibility, values, and committed action interact when people attempt to change. The framework’s Enactment capacity is partly informed by this tradition.