Submissions are invited for the second symposium organised by Photography Studies College and the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, on the theme of ‘Borderless Futures: Reimaging the Citizen’. The symposium will be held in Ballarat on Saturday 29 August 2015.

In the catalogue for the The photograph and Australia exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales this year, Senior Curator Judy Annear wrote, ‘There is much at stake in what might constitute the nation state, which is as porous as photography is mutable’. Among its many ideas, the exhibition posited photography in Australia as a medium for the constant renegotiation of the nation. This symposium aims to continue the discussion generated by the most important exhibition of photography in Australia in 25 years, by looking beyond national borders to ask what it means to be a global citizen, with particular reference to the role of images.

Subjects may include:

• Indigenous image-making and identity
• migration, families, and communities
• art as utopian model
• citizen journalism and other new approaches to the documentary genre
• the politics of social media and new media
• the stateless photographer
• photobooks as global artefacts
• any topic concerned with the transmission of images and texts across societies, past and present

We are inviting papers and presentations of creative projects. We also intend to have a special ‘discursive’ session dedicated to discussion of papers made available online beforehand, as an alternative to the conventional symposium paper format. Proposals are welcome from creative practitioners, researchers, and postgraduate students working across all aspects of the arts, including photography, multimedia, performance, and writing.

Please send a title and an abstract of 200 words, or detailed expressions of interest for a 15–20 minute presentation, indicating your institutional affiliation or independent status, and whether you would prefer to be in a ‘discursive’ session, to symposium@psc.edu.au by 24 June.