Meta-relationality is an orientation to relational patterns that emerge through systemic entanglement and shape collective perception, sense-making, and the ability to respond over time.
The Meta-Relationality Institute is a space for emergent, crucial relational interventions in a period of deep systemic destabilization. Our work begins from the recognition that many of the frameworks, assumptions, and habits of sense-making that once oriented institutions, movements, and communities are no longer adequate to the conditions now unfolding.
Rather than offering solutions, predictions, or prescriptions, the Institute focuses on cultivating relational capacity: the ability to perceive complexity, hold uncertainty, metabolize grief, and work across difference without reproducing the polarizing dynamics that currently undermine collective response. We attend not only to what is changing, but to how people are oriented toward change affectively, relationally, historically, and ethically.
Clearing the Field is an ongoing series of public resources published by the Meta-Relationality Institute. The series supports the creation of relational containers within organizations, movements, and communities. These containers make it possible to hold multiple, intersecting layers of rapid transformation together, across geopolitical, ecological, technological, economic, and psychosocial fields.
The resources are not intended to induce alarm or rush people toward action. Their purpose is to build discernment. They help surface when inherited strategies no longer fit present conditions. They name how refusal to look can become a liability, and why nostalgia is not an effective strategy. They also attend to how urgency to double down on what worked in the past can mask avoidance of grief and denial of systemic unravelling.
Clearing the Field invites a different kind of preparedness. This preparedness is grounded in relational maturity, temporal awareness, and the capacity to remain present with complexity without collapsing into certainty, immobilization, or antagonism.
Across the series, we work to create shared conditions for thinking and acting together without requiring agreement, convergence, or ideological alignment. The aim is not consensus, but relational coherence without coercion; not unity, but the ability to move responsibly together across differences at a time when the stakes of misrecognition, simplification, and fragmentation are increasingly high.
The Meta-Relationality Institute and the Clearing the Field series emerge from a longer arc of inquiry articulated in the books Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Activism and Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Compassion and Accountability. Together, these works explore how dominant responses to global crises are shaped by modern assumptions that limit our ability to face complexity, hold complicity, and respond without reproducing harm.
The resources in Clearing the Field are written by an anonymous international collective of researchers, scholars, practitioners, and policy analysts. From their standpoint, what is often described as a “polycrisis” or “meta-crisis” is understood instead as a meta-consequence and poly-culmination: the converging effects of long-standing social, ecological, economic, and epistemic arrangements reaching their limits. The series is offered as a contribution to collective sense-making, shared in generosity rather than ownership, without claims to authority, intellectual capture, or proprietary insight.All resources are published under a Creative Commons license, inviting careful reuse, adaptation, and circulation in ways that support relational responsibility, contextual discernment, and collective learning across differences.
Meta-Relationality Institute 