The Australian Anthropology Society's 2022 conference took place in person on the lands of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin
nations, at the Waurn Ponds (Geelong) campus of Deakin University, 23-26 November 2022.
It's theme, 'Life Support', drew attention to the principles, processes, activities, and ideologies of humans and non-humans who variously foster, care for, legitimise, frustrate, and explicitly reject particular forms of life. 'Life support' is ambivalent and provocative. It evokes the discipline's focus on mutually-constituted lived experience, and the ethical drive of many disciplinary practitioners to work in support, advocacy, and activism, as well as the status of the discipline as one in search of a thriving future. 'Life Support' evokes the institutions and technical apparatus that are increasingly necessary for survival at a range of scales, from the microscopic to the global. It suggests processes and situations at their beginnings and ends, the etiology of triage, entropy and palliative care, of birth, (re)creation and transubstantiation.
The final day of events migrated the AAS conference and the AAS Distinguished Lecture to
Melbourne city to coincide with the opening of the Council of Humanities and Social Sciences
(CHASS) Congress (27th Nov–2nd Dec).