2025 Scouting Symposium Germany - The Colonial Heritage of Scouting

From 4 to 6 April 2025, the seventh Fachtagung Pfadfinden (hereafter: Scouting Symposium), will take place at Ludwigstein castle near Witzenhausen. The participants will discuss the colonialist past of Scouting and the reflection on its continued impact on current work. In addition, the organizing team also wants to offer young scholars the opportunity to present current research projects on other topics related to the Scouting movement. 
The 2025 symposium will treat the colonialist beginnings of the Scout movement: When the British General Robert Baden-Powell organized the first Scout camp on Brownsea Island in 1907, his pedagogical ideas were clearly embedded in the context of contemporary British colonialism. Scouts were at that time still an exclusively male youth organization and intended to provide competent, responsible, and morally educated staff for the British Empire. Under the impact of the catastrophe of the First World War, Baden-Powell reconceived the idea of Scouting as a peace movement: As a worldwide movement, Scouts from all nations were to become familiar with each other through joint events and this mutual understanding was intended to help prevent future wars. This tension between colonialism and the ideal of friendship between all Scouts will be critically reflected upon with a heightened sensitivity as to how and to what extent the phenomena of racist discrimination and structural racism inherent in colonialism continue to have an impact on Scouting.
Since 2010, the Scouting Symposium strives to enable and empower scholarly research on the German Scout Movement, in particular its pedagogical foundations, history, and the practices of its associations and groups. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, this conference offers academics a forum to present research findings on these topics and to discuss them with both an academic audience and active scouts. So far, six symposium proceedings with selected contributions have been published.