This looks pretty interesting:

Society for Photographic Education 43nd National Conference
A New Pluralism: Photography’s Future
March 23-26, 2006 in Chicago, Illinois

For fifty years we have been living in a world inundated and defined by photographic imagery while photography has been taught in relative isolation in academia. SPE members recognize the necessity to address the cultural context of our medium, moving beyond academic boundaries. A New Pluralism: Photography’s Future seeks to explore the current cultural and conceptual evolution of the photographic image and the influence new technologies are having on our understanding of what it means to make photographs both in and out of our departments.

[…]

Lecturers, panelists and imagemakers are invited to submit proposals that address and debate a wide range of issues regarding photography’s future including: assessing the academic consequences, new constituencies, partnerships and pluralism created by digital technologies; works based on a dialectic between photography as art and other uses of the medium: science, reportage and cultural language, anthropology, entertainment, mass media, fashion; taking a look at both the surface and beneath the surface of the image in virtual and malleable picture spaces; and new media forms that cross traditional academic boundaries.

For the call for papers and more info, see the conference website.