Character and Global Challenges
January 9th – 11th 2025
If the character-and-virtue agenda in philosophy, psychology, and education is to maintain its contemporary relevance, it needs to be brought to bear on ongoing and future global challenges. Global challenges of our time include: the mental health epidemic; the sudden rise of GenAI and related new technologies that open a Pandora’s box of moral issues; increasing environmental threats; and perceived political dysfunction leading to increased polarisation. All these challenges, and others, threaten the moral ecology underlying healthy character development.
The aim of the 13th annual Jubilee Centre conference is to bring discourses about global challenges closer together by exploring how current agendas in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and character education can inform and advance knowledge and understanding. The conference will bring together experts from a range of disciplines to explore the following big questions and many more. Can theorists from philosophy, moral and developmental psychology, education, sociology, theology, history, and technology learn from each other’s work? How can insights from theory and practice be integrated to address pressing global concerns?
We look forward to welcoming our keynote speakers for 2025: Jeffrey Rosen, (President of National Constitution Center), Daniel Porterfield (President and CEO of the Aspen Institute), and Professor Alessandra Tanesini (Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University).
We hereby send out an open call for presentations falling under the broad theme of the conference. Our focus is on any ongoing and future global challenges to healthy character development. We welcome proposals discussing AI, mental health, and environmental and political issues and will also look favourably upon proposals that explore different character-related challenges from an educational, social scientific, philosophical, religious or practice-oriented perspective. There will be parallel sessions devoted to general topics in the area of character, virtue and character education. We particularly welcome proposals from teachers, professionals, and other practitioners.
We ask interested parties to send us an abstract of about 500 words to jubileecentrepapers@contacts.bham.ac.uk (marked ORIEL PROPOSAL in the subject line) before June 14th 2024. We would ask that you please indicate clearly on the proposal whether multiple authors would be expecting to attend and who would be lead author. Due to limited spaces, we may not be able to offer a place to all authors on an accepted paper. We will send out notifications of acceptance before the end of July.
The conference fee is £450 and covers full board at Oriel College (2 nights), including the formal conference dinner. Details of how to pay the registration fee will be provided in due course.
Interested in previous conferences? Click here to explore the papers and topics from the 2024 conference, ‘Virtuous Leadership and Character‘.