‘Relational epistemology and living law: an analysis of circles of women in Poland.’

This article investigates the form of living law based on relational epistemology and care outside formal legal institutions. Focusing on women's circles in Poland – informal, community-based gatherings centred on practices of sharing, listening, and mutual witnessing – it asks where and how women's experiences gain normative recognition when they remain invisible or inadequately addressed within state law. The article argues that within such spaces, relational epistemology enables the emergence of a distinct form of living law. Care functions not only as an ethical orientation but also as a stabilising principle that shapes mutual expectations and thereby produces normativity. Drawing on Eugen Ehrlich's concept of living law, the study interprets these relational practices as constituting an everyday normative order that exists beyond formal legality while performing analogous regulatory and justice-producing functions.