Polar Night Celebration is an annual event held in November at UiT The Arctic University of Norway (Campus Breivika) organized by UiT’s International Cooperation Section in collaboration with the Center for Arctic Humanities to mark the beginning of the two-month light and dark season. It brings together students and staff for performances, traditional food, and lectures on themes our researchers are currently working on. The celebration is a space for inter-cultural communication and inter-generational exchange, where participants can learn from each other across various backgrounds.
Please register for attendance in the column to the right. Students need to log in with Feide in order to register.
Program
10:00 Welcome by Mari Buck
10:15 How is AI going to change knowledge production? Keynote lecture by Melina Duarte, Head of Department at the Institute of Philosophy followed by a Q&A session
11:00 Creative act /tba
11:15 First Impressions… Photovoice Competition Award Ceremony with Lilli Mittner and Jorge Santos
11:30 Creative act /tba
12:00 Norwegian Christmas food buffet served by Samskipnaden
How is AI going to change knowledge production?
At UiT Samtaler this autumn, the Rector posed an intriguing question: «How is AI going to change knowledge production?» For universities, this is a core question, because if AI radically changes how knowledge is produced, it may also change what makes a good researcher and, more fundamentally, what universities are for.
For the Polar Night Celebration 2026, I invite you to explore this question with me philosophically. Philosophers have an irritating habit of returning to fundamental questions that we think we understand, only to reveal that we do not. So we begin with a deceptively simple question: What is knowledge? From Plato’s Theaetetus to the Gettier problem, philosophers have struggled to explain what separates knowledge from a belief that merely happens to be true. But the idea that knowledge requires some form of justification remained central. And it is precisely here that AI now seems to unsettle the picture.
What happens when machines can produce answers that are convincing, sophisticated, and often correct, while we may not fully understand how those answers were reached? Does AI strengthen our capacity for justified knowledge, or does it make justification harder to locate?
Following this question takes us from ancient epistemology to a very contemporary problem: what happens to the relation between knowledge and justification when AI enters knowledge production? Who or what does the knowing? Who will the good researcher be? And what will count as a good reason to trust the result?
Come and help to explore the answers to these questions!
When: 20.11.26 at 10.00–13.00
Where:
Bazinga Bar, Cantina Teorifagbygget 1
Location / Campus: Tromsø
Target group: Employees, Students, Guests
Contact: Mari Buck
E-mail: mari.buck@uit.no
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