Celebrating the first decade of it’s work the Jubilee Centre brought together more than 120 experts from a range of disciplines for its 10th anniversary conference at Oriel College, Oxford, between the 8th and 10th of September 2022.  ‘Integrating Research on Character and Virtues: 10 Years of Impact’ took stock of the impact that the Centre’s work has had while also exploring the merits and demerits of cross-disciplinarity in the character-and-virtue research field(s). Among the big questions that emerged here are: How amenable are the different research traditions of philosophy and social science to crossover work? How easy is it to integrate the foci on what a virtue ‘is’ (philosophy) and how it is ‘experienced’ (psychology) with how it can be ‘cultivated in educational settings’ (education)? Have academics and practitioners been able to communicate effectively, and how can such communication be enhanced? The ten years since the Jubilee Centre was founded have witnessed an enormous surge of interest in character-and-virtue research across a number of different academic disciplines, with inroads also made into various fields of practice. This renewed interest has been stimulated by generous grants from the John Templeton and Kern Family Foundations, and the Presidents of both organisations, Heather Templeton Dill and Jim Rahn, joined and spoke after the dinners as part of this conference. Alongside 40 seminar papers, keynote lectures were offer by Professor James Arthur (University of Birmingham, UK), David Goodhart (Policy Exchange, UK), and Professor Dan Lapsley (University of Notre Dame, USA) and an expert panel was convened to discuss the legacy and impact of the centre since 2012.

• Fr. James Burns – President, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota
• Lord James O’Shaughnessy – Senior Research Fellow, Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues
• Dr. Beth Purvis –  Senior Program Director, Character Kern Family Foundation
• Professor Concepción Naval – Dean, School of Education and and Psychology, University of Navarra
• Professor Blaine Fowers – Professor of Psychology, University of Miami
• Ben Perks – Head of Campaigns & Advocacy, UNICEF

Further details, the programme, those papers given, and comments shared by delegates after its conclusion can be found here and here.