For many, the conditions and privileges of citizenship, and the access it provides to equal civil, political and social rights, are taken for granted. Yet citizenship always implies histories of inclusion and exclusion and in settler nations with colonial roots, the history of citizenship is entangled with the legacies of colonisation. Looking beyond its legal definition to the wider historical processes through which citizenship and its associated ideas of rights and belonging have been imagined, debated and found lasting form, this collection considers the unique role of visual culture in defining, contesting and advancing ideas of citizenship in settler national contexts from the 19th century to the present day.
Addressing citizenship's particular entanglements with colonial histories in contemporary settler nations, the collection considers how images have shaped the meanings and experiences of citizenship from the colonial era, through periods of mass global migration to contemporary geopolitical change and debates on Indigenous rights and recognition. Contributors explore the role visual culture has played in imagining or interrogating ideas about belonging, rights, civic identity, and the ideal citizen in societies that continue to grapple with their settler colonial origins. They ask how image-making may be used to negotiate or contest the limits of citizenship, whether as a legal or as an imagined cultural category, and the role of visual culture in building relationships between citizens, non-citizens and the state. This collection will provide a new and compelling history of citizenship and the ways it has been defined, not only by historicising citizenship's visual imagery but by exploring its present effects and legacies.
Lydon, Jane: - Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. She currently leads the Australian Research Council-funded project, 'Globalization, Photography, and Race: the Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photographs in Europe', which is partnered with four major European museums: the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, UK, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, UK, the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris, France, and the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, the Netherlands.
Miles, Melissa: - Professor Melissa Miles is a photography historian and the Associate Dean, Research at Monash University's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Australia. Her research explores the interdisciplinary qualities of photography and its movement across the domains of art, law, politics and history. The role of photographs in cross-cultural photographic relations is another key area of research interest. She is author of Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia-Japan Relationship (with Robin Gerster, 2018), The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography (2015), The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light (2008), and co-editor of The Culture of Photography in Public Space (with Anne Marsh and Daniel Palmer, 2015).
Nettelbeck, Amanda: - Amanda Nettelbeck is Professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University, Australia. Her research centres on the history and memory of colonial violence, Indigenous/settler relations, and the legal governance of Indigenous peoples.
