This participatory arts-based research project engaged young people across four conflict-affected districts in Uganda—Kitgum, Kasese, Amuria, and Adjumani—to explore how the past, present, and future intersect in their everyday lives. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project emphasized youth agency, creativity, and community memory in a society still shaped by the legacies of colonialism, war, and displacement.

Rather than focusing solely on trauma or victimhood, the project foregrounded "future imaginary work" as a way to deepen youth engagement with heritage and transitional justice. Through drawing, poetry, storytelling, drama, object curation, and collective exhibitions, young people reframed difficult pasts as starting points for imagining more peaceful, just futures.

"We wanted the idea of the future to be something our young participants constructed together, in dialogue and iteratively, so that the project had a sense of collaboration and shared interests." (p. 225)

Methodology

• Youth Advisory Boards were formed in each district to co-design the process, guide ethical practices, and define meaningful forms of expression.
• Creative outputs included poems, visual art, stories, music, objects, and proverbs, rooted in everyday life.
• A touring exhibition moved from region to region, inviting young participants to add their work, react to others' contributions, and discuss shared challenges and futures.
• Material memory objects, such as hoes, pangas, bones, and spears, were both reminders of war and symbols of endurance and transformation. "These objects from conflicted pasts were used by young people to describe 'futures-already-in-the-making', the steps were already in place for the futures to emerge as they would like." (p. 237)

Examples of Imagined Futures

Young participants envisioned futures grounded in peace, unity, and opportunity, yet remained honest about doubt and hardship:

• Peace through sport and friendship: "If people are in sports they forget about their bad things when they are idle, leading to a better performance of peace and unity." (p. 242)
• Youth as communicators and educators: "If I become a journalist in the future, I know if there is anything wrong, I can help the community and my country. I can speak it out." (p. 243)
• Reconciliation through selective remembrance: "Let's forget the mistakes... and aim to change the world to be a peaceful world, not again a world of conflict." (p. 241)

Many youth emphasized building the future through dialogue, shared memory, and practical community efforts such as education and reforestation. The project invited reflection not only on what should be remembered, but also on what might need to be let go in order to move forward.

Outcomes

• Expanded understanding of youth heritage work as active, future-facing, and situated in local contexts.
• Democratization of memory work, disrupting national narratives with vernacular, embodied experiences.
• Creation of living archives of art, memory objects, and dialogues reflecting Uganda's diverse post-conflict realities.
• Strengthened youth civic voice in transitional justice processes, often dominated by adults or state institutions.

"Young people have an important part to play in processes of 'rememoration'... digesting the formal, state-led education they receive and placing it alongside the memories of the past that they have been exposed to within their local connections." (p. 240)