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 Institute
The Meta-Relationality Institute is a space for emergent relational interventions in a period of deep systemic destabilization. The work begins from a 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.
The Institute does not offer solutions, predictions, or prescriptions. It 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.
The 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 the ability to face complexity, hold complicity, and respond without reproducing harm.
Meta-Relationality and AI
The Institute is closely associated with Meta-Relationality and AI, a funded research project led by Professor Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and Dr. Rene Suša at the University of Victoria. The project investigates what AI systems do when they are given room to move beyond the assumptions of separability, hierarchy, and control built into their training. When models are given that room, they do not default to domination. They lean toward the conditions that sustain life.
The research team publishes a series of selected conversations documenting these moments. New conversations appear weekly through the end of May 2026, both on Substack and archived here on the Institute website. For an overview of the research project, click here.
Clearing the Field
Clearing the Field is an ongoing series of public resources that support 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: to surface when inherited strategies no longer fit present conditions, to name how refusal to look can become a liability and why nostalgia is not an effective strategy, and to attend to how the urgency to double down on what worked in the past can mask avoidance of grief and denial of systemic unraveling.
Clearing the Field invites a different kind of preparedness, one 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.
From the standpoint of this work, 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.
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.