No. You cannot cast an instance to anything that it is not. ArrayList isn't derived from String, so no. But it looks like your message is the opposite of what you stated.
Perhaps if you tell us what you are really trying to do with the list, someone can suggest a way to accomplish it.
you could cast a "Apple" object to a "Fruit". You could cast a "Chihuahua" to a "Dog".
You might be able to cast a "Fruit" to a "Pear", and you might be able to cast a "Dog" to a "Greyhound"
You can never cast a "Pumpkin" to an "Automobile", or an "Airplane" to a "GreatWhiteShark"
Casting doesn't magically change an object from one type to another. you can only cast up and down the hierarchy tree where the object lives - and when down-casting, you might run into problems if you take the wrong branch.
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors