Research & public education
Help people recognise power, understand influence and judge more carefully in the situations they encounter.
MPI develops research, books and public learning programmes that connect this work with cultural understanding, democratic participation and resilience.
Two public programmes and a method in development.
Power, authority and the space for disagreement. Includes the proposed Authority Trial public lab.
Cognition, dementia, personhood and recognition, developed around the book project.
Psychoanalytic inquiry within concrete events, connected to power dynamics.
Projects are in development. Partners, scope and funding will be established for each project.
MetaPower Press is the publishing imprint of MetaPower Institute.
Books by Ron Jacobs and collaborators on power, identity and human action. The programme brings together philosophical inquiry, literary non-fiction, autobiography, boxing and historical editions, supported by our editorial and design team.
Develop a question, a pilot or a public programme with MPI.
We welcome educational, cultural, civic and care organisations, researchers and funders.
MetaPower Institute
Understanding power in the service of culture, democracy and resilience.
Digital systems, dense networks and accelerating exchanges bring more information into the situations we inhabit. An answer can arrive before we have understood the question, the interests at stake or the authority behind it.
MPI asks how quick explanations and AI-assisted responses affect judgement. When do they help us understand? When do they encourage us to hand over our own interpretation?
Our mission is to develop research and public programmes on power and identity that strengthen cultural understanding, democratic participation and resilience.
Examine how stories, images and practices shape identity, recognition and authority.
Help people question authority, weigh arguments and participate in collective decisions.
Develop the capacity to notice influence, consider alternatives and respond with others.
The current priority is the first project portfolio. Future themes will develop only where they extend its questions and have suitable partners.
How automated explanations, recommendation systems and digital networks influence authority, interpretation and responsibility.
How narratives, institutions and collective identities shape legitimacy and power. Russia is one possible case context within this line of inquiry.
How people read dependence, recognition and influence in relationships, and how this informs responsible action.
Research & public programmes
Two public programmes and a method in development. Each begins with a question that matters beyond the institute.
How do power and authority emerge in the events we take part in? The programme examines how voices gain weight, decisions become accepted and disagreement remains possible.
Current focus: a partner-based pilot for Authority Trial.
Explore The Wicked RoomWho are we when cognitive capacities change? A programme on dementia, identity, relationships and how a person continues to be recognised.
Current focus: shaping the book-linked inquiry and finding appropriate care and knowledge partners.
Explore Who RemainsWhat becomes visible when psychoanalytic attention enters the event itself? This project connects affect, desire and defense with the power dynamics of lived situations.
Current focus: developing and critically examining a method through carefully documented cases.
Explore the method projectProgrammes are in development. Scope, participants, partners and funding will be established for each project.
Power & authority · In development
Who gets to define what is happening — and what can be done next?
A meeting, a public debate or a conflict can appear settled before everyone has had a chance to speak. What gives a decision authority? How do roles, language, loyalties and the pace of an encounter shape its outcome?
The Wicked Room develops these questions through a book, talks and public learning formats. Its first proposed pilot is Authority Trial: a facilitated lab for examining how authority is exercised and challenged.
A structured encounter with a real dilemma, developed with an educational, cultural or civic partner.
Participants work with a consented or fictionalised case: who was present, what happened and what remains unknown. Observation is separated from interpretation.
The group uses the power dynamics lenses to examine roles, frames, symbols, stories, tempo and defensive responses. Competing explanations stay in view.
Participants explore how a different question, procedure or intervention could change the situation. Reflection records what became clearer and what needs further inquiry.
The pilot format, duration and group size will be agreed with the partner. No public dates have been set.
Boxing offers a possible field setting for studying authority, discipline, trust and judgement under pressure. Training, master-level practice and professional competition raise questions that can be examined within this programme.
Any field inquiry would make Ron’s roles as participant, trainer and researcher explicit. The field component and any related tour are possibilities for development, with their own scope and partners.
We are looking to connect a concrete partner question with a workable Authority Trial format.
The next phase is to agree a case, audience, facilitation plan, budget and way of evaluating the experience.
Cognition & identity · In development
When cognition changes, how do we continue to recognise the person?
Changes in memory, language or orientation can alter how someone is understood and addressed. The questions are also relational: who listens, who decides and which forms of recognition remain available?
Linked to the book project Who Remains, this programme investigates cognition and dementia through personhood, relationships, dignity and participation.
Clarify the central questions and bring philosophical work into conversation with relevant knowledge and lived experience.
Develop an accessible format with care professionals, researchers and people with relevant lived experience. Participation and consent arrangements should fit the setting.
Explore how texts, conversations and cases can help people reflect on recognition, agency and decision-making when cognition changes.
This is a programme of philosophical inquiry and public education. It does not offer diagnosis or treatment.
The programme is at the stage of defining its research questions and identifying appropriate care, knowledge and public partners. A first seminar will follow from a shared question and a feasible project plan.
Method development · In development
Bring psychoanalytic attention into the event: a meeting, an encounter, a conflict, a public situation.
Desire, affect and defense take shape within relationships and circumstances. A reaction that seems purely personal may also involve authority, dependency, belonging or the possibility of losing one’s position.
Psychoanalysis on Sneakers develops a way of investigating these connections within concrete events. Its working basis is Psycho–Event–Strategy, read through the six power dynamics lenses.
Develop consented, anonymised or fictionalised cases with enough detail to distinguish what happened from what is inferred.
Examine how inner experience and the unfolding situation inform each other. Interpretations of motive or defense remain hypotheses, open to correction.
Use seminars and learning labs to ask what the model reveals, what it overlooks and where a different approach is needed.
The immediate task is to define a small case series, its ethical and interpretive boundaries, and a format for critical discussion. This is a developing method, with its scope and limits still to be examined.
The conceptual foundation
Read a situation closely. Keep interpretations open. Act, then look again.
MPI starts from a relational, process-based view: people, identities and forms of authority take shape through the situations in which they participate.
How possibilities, dependencies and influence take shape across people, institutions, networks, resources and shared meanings.
The concrete configuration of people, roles, language, bodies and circumstances.
How that configuration develops, holds together and changes through events.
Identity enters a situation as a history and a position. It can also be confirmed, challenged or changed by what happens.
Three connected questions. We move between them as an event unfolds.
What is being experienced? Attend to affect, desire, identification and possible defensive responses without assuming access to another person’s inner life.
What is happening here? Reconstruct the encounter, its sequence, its relationships and the conditions that make certain responses possible.
What could be done, and with what consequences? Consider possible interventions, their responsibilities and what their effects reveal.
This is a working model under development. Its interpretations should be examined against observations, alternative explanations and participants’ accounts.
Each lens opens a line of inquiry. Together they help us notice what a single explanation might miss.
Roles, rules, resources and dependencies that distribute room to act.
Who can decide, speak, refuse or leave?
The definition of the situation: what counts as the problem, what is relevant and which responses seem reasonable.
Who defines what this is a case of?
The signs, positions, gestures and objects through which authority or belonging becomes recognisable.
What makes a person or position appear legitimate?
The stories that connect events and give people roles, intentions and a place in the account.
Whose story becomes the shared version?
Bodily and affective states: tension, activation, felt intensity and impulses to act, considered within the unfolding situation.
What bodily or affective changes are reported or observed, and what remains uncertain?
Possible ways of managing threat, uncertainty or vulnerability, considered alongside other explanations.
What might this response protect — and what else could explain it?
The lenses are prompts for inquiry. A reading of power is strengthened by evidence, context and the possibility of being wrong.
We distinguish observation, interpretation and conclusion. We ask what evidence supports a reading, what contradicts it and which questions remain open.
Projects should document their questions and methods, invite critical discussion and separate direct outputs from hoped-for public effects. The model’s usefulness has to be examined in actual work.
Reading power begins with a pause between what we notice and what we conclude.
Illustrative case — not a research finding.
One voice closes
the conversation.
From the head of the table, the chair says, “We agree, then.” A junior colleague lowers their raised hand. Nobody objects before the meeting moves on.
The chair speaks. A raised hand is lowered. The meeting continues without an objection.
These are observations. Agreement, fear and deliberate exclusion have not been established.
Who controls speaking turns? What makes “consensus” a convincing description? Does silence protect someone’s position?
It may also express agreement, uncertainty or a wish to respond later. Each reading remains a hypothesis to examine.
Pause the decision. Ask which concerns remain and offer a written response route. Record unresolved points.
Revisit the interpretation in light of what participants actually say. Acting also gives us something new to observe.
MetaPower Institute
The people and responsibilities behind MPI’s research and public programmes.
MPI’s programmes and organisational arrangements are in development. Project partners will contribute domain knowledge and critical perspectives.
MPI is a foundation with a public mission. Its programmes and organisational arrangements are in development. Its governance is intended to make responsibilities, decisions and the use of funds transparent.
The institute’s organisational and governance arrangements are being developed alongside the first projects.
Partnerships & project development
A concrete question is a good place to begin.
We welcome educational, cultural, civic and care organisations, researchers and funders interested in developing a project with public value.
You may have a situation to examine, a group to work with or a research question that could become a pilot. We can explore the fit, the intended contribution and what a realistic first step would involve.