About

The Narrative Praxis Institute is an independent research and public scholarship platform examining how institutional narratives influence financial systems, economic participation, and public trust.

The Institute explores the relationship between historical memory, institutional communication, and contemporary financial behavior through interdisciplinary inquiry grounded in organizational studies, narrative analysis, and public scholarship.

Current areas of inquiry include:

• institutional trust in financial systems,
• financial communication and public understanding,
• narrative frameworks shaping economic participation,
• and the relationship between access, legitimacy, and institutional memory in contemporary finance.

The Institute’s work includes scholarly articles for academic institutions and public policy research institutes, essays, collaborative inquiry, and research-informed analysis intended to support deeper understanding of how narrative systems shape modern economic life.

Dahna Chandler is a finance narrative historian and doctoral researcher completing a Doctor of Education in Organizational Change and Leadership at the USC Rossier School of Education. Her research investigates how institutional communication shapes financial access and trust formation among historically excluded populations. 

It examines how the language, frameworks, and structural positioning of financial institutions determine who understands themselves as belonging inside or outside the systems those institutions govern.

Her work draws on organizational change theory, narrative analysis, and adult learning frameworks. Her particular focus is on how financial institutions structure access to wealth-building products and services in ways that create systematic barriers for communities seeking to build and maintain wealth, and how institutional communication sustains those conditions.

The research is grounded in qualitative inquiry and oriented toward producing educational tools that are rigorous, accessible, and useful to the communities it examines. These tools are designed to facilitate experiential change in communities experiencing marginalization from mainstream financial systems.

Before pursuing doctoral research, Chandler built a finance journalism career spanning nearly three decades. She contributed bylined work to media outlets and financial brands including Black Enterprise, NBC's TODAY, Yahoo! Money, Forbes Advisor, American Express Business Intel, The Hartford, and Family Business Magazine. 

She currently serves as a private wealth editorial strategist for private wealth management institutions, developing client education content for mass affluent and emerging high-net-worth clients—giving her practitioner-level insight into the institutions and client populations her doctoral research examines.

Chandler produced rigorous reporting at the intersection of financial systems, community economic life, and the institutions built to serve populations mainstream finance has historically excluded. Her work includes award-winning accountability journalism recognized by the New York Association of Black Journalists.

She founded The Narrative Praxis Institute as the platform through which her research and public scholarship reach the audiences that need them most. That includes communities navigating financial systems, scholars studying them, and fellow researchers and writers whose work advances honest examination of how those systems operate.