The three project areas are derived from the concept of episteme, understood to mean that knowledge is always the object of processes of negotiation in which understanding and insights may be secured, recognised, categorised, organised and authorised and, likewise, also destabilised, substituted or abandoned.

Associated with these are specific justifications and claims to validity. The assertion of such is particularly important in the context of change processes. For these purposes, a broad approach to justification is taken, allowing different media configurations to be included in the inquiry.

The validity of knowledge can be secured in language terms through assertion and argumentation. Projects concerned primarily with these forms of knowledge are grouped in Project Area A: Telling. In addition, justifications exist in visual and demonstrative form and which are aimed at a specific (partly non-discursive) way of viewing things (Project Area B: Showing). Finally, we examine those forms of knowledge that acquire their legitimacy through performative acts and/or socio-cultural and institutional enforcement (Project Area C: Doing).

The Collaborative Research Centre is also home to a transfer project implemented in cooperation with the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin.