‘I felt as if I was overflowing’: transitions to adulthood in the aftermath of the Colombian armed conflict

This paper proposes a rethinking of the temporal conditions of childhood by centring the affective experiences of fourteen young activists who continuously inhabit the past by working at a collective memory museum in Colombia. It questions notions of time as linear, progressive, chronological, and universal and instead presents alternative ways of being in time. I discuss young activists' struggles to imagine mundane futures while constantly comparing themselves with the experiences of the victims of the armed conflict. I then discuss how the museum, as an institutional site of remembrance, sanitises and dictates how the young museum workers ought to remember, making them feel inadequate when their emotions do not align with the museum's mission. The young activists demonstrate how their transitions into adulthood are determined by simultaneously inhabiting multiple temporalities and defying adult expectations on how to remember.