The subproject explores the complex processes of transformations of the popular in Pier Paolo Pasolini's work in the fields of literature, film, television, politics, cultural criticism and gender discourse. In doing so, the project aims at the tension between the "cultura popolare" and the established culture, which as mass culture in Italy of the 1950s-70s questions the front line between 'lower class culture' and 'high culture'. Pasolini contrasts consumer culture as "cultura del potere" with the Roman subproletariat, so that power and gender relations are also negotiated with popular culture. In Pasolini's work, popular culture becomes the starting point of polemical confrontations that make the conditions of popular ways of speaking visible and thus raise central problematics of the media, aesthetic and political representation of the popular. How must the conceptual and problematic history of the popular be perspectivised from Pasolini's point of view? Which ways of speaking the popular/unpopular/non-popular are constituted by Pasolini's work? Which media and discourses intertwine here? How does the Romance cultural tradition inscribe itself in the heterogeneous prehistory of the popular as an inescapable condition of cultural self-understanding?

The research will be carried out in three areas of work

1. popular ways of speaking
2. youth culture and gender discourse
3. cinema and television.