NTNU Ocean Week is the annual conference hosted by NTNU Oceans, one of NTNU’s four strategic research areas, exploring interdisciplinary research and sustainability challenges. NTNU Ocean Week at Svalbard brings together participants with various degrees of expertise and experience working at the intersection of the physical sciences, ethics, policy, anthropology, and the arts, to explore critical conversations in sustainability and endangerment under the rubric of Making Use of Arctic Science.
Our exchange takes place at a time when the differences that once separated scientific knowledge from “information” deployed in policy and market domains are collapsing. In the past, scientists deployed stable forms of knowledge whose significance, once established, decayed slowly. In contrast, immediate news drives investment and policy decisions where the accuracy of prediction is not as important as the arrival of new information. Today, the constant creation of new data continually excites science, market, and political domains alike so that we are, all of us, looking forward to the next piece of information. At the same time, Arctic sciences, natural and social, are detailed, diverse, multi-disciplinary and faced with the rapidity of planetary environmental change including global warming, ocean acidification, pollutants from toxic chemicals as well as emerging concerns related to deep-sea mining, war, and migration.
Given the rapidity of change in knowledge regimes and global environments, our first goal is to consider how we make use of science as a basis of future making, understanding Arctic/Ocean change, and the broader role of knowledge in economics and politics. How do such changes alter traditional processes in science that document research results as true or at least as the best available knowledge?
In addition to the insight offered by participants in these fields, this research theme is robustly grounded in the project’s institutional hubs: at NTNU and UNIS, with strength in Arctic studies and the presence of extractive and energy industries in Norway; at Berkeley, with its strength in energy and climate sciences. Creating a durable research network across these three institutions and network of additional partners stands to advance multi-disciplinary and area scholarship, enhance graduate training, and promote international scientific exchange. Our second goal, therefore, is to bring together a small group of science scholars whose intersecting work on the Arctic, oceanic studies, energy, infrastructure, and climate and the arts offer a unique and collective intellectual formation for ongoing research into the New Arctic. With seed funds from NTNU and the Peder Sather Center at UC Berkeley, we aim to lay the groundwork for a loose but robust collaborative network through which we can shape a shared research program.
Click here to learn more about NTNU Ocean Week 2023
This is a public event taking place at The University Centre in Svalbard located in the town of Longyearbyen. If you want to participate or attend any of the activities and presentations please send an email listed in the Contact page of this website. More information regarding Format and Schedule will be uploaded soon.