LAUSR

This themed issue aims to investigate the role of visual culture in defining, contesting and advancing ideas of Australian citizenship and its attendant rights, from white settlement to the present. Acknowledging, but looking beyond, the legal status of citizenship, these articles seek to explore the broader processes throughwhich this cultural category is constituted and deployed. This question is timely in an era when global networks such as economic and business processes, communication, and the movement of people are increasingly interconnected, and yet simultaneously we see both the resurgence of hypernationalism, as well as the assertion of rights based on difference within, against and across the nation state. Important recent research has focused upon the role of visual culture within geopolitical processes, from climate change disaster to the impact of the Covid pandemic, and especially the challenges shared by many nations, such as new nationalisms, the escalation of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the revitalisation of white supremacist movements, economic inequality both domestically and globally, and threats to democracy such as ‘fake news’. Many of these global challenges have contributed to the recent interest in how visual culture helps to both assert and challenge the meanings of citizenship. A citizen is a legally recognised subject of a state or commonwealth, and citizenship refers to the legal status of being a citizen – a relationship between an individual and a state that confers access to equal civil, political, and social rights. However, this status is not reducible to legal definitions and frameworks, but is contingent and dynamic, and formed, debated, and shared across a wide range of cultural processes and relationships. The category of Australian citizenship has lacked clear legal and cultural definition, making it especially challenging to historicise. Until the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 (Cth) came into effect on 26 January 1949, Australian national status was that of ‘British