Yovanna Pineda

Dr. Yovanna Pineda is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Africana Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, specializing in the history of technology, cultural, and economic history in Argentina. I completed my first book, Industrial Development in a Frontier Economy: The Industrialization of Argentina, 1890-1930, with Stanford University Press in 2009 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=9726. I have devoted a publishing career on writing about Argentine history, industrialization, and labor. My second monograph and ongoing work Spectacular Bodies is substantially reframed from previous work because of its use of memory, media, and aesthetics to reveal workers’ concepts of the future of work.

Spectacular Bodies: Aesthetics of Labor and the Future of Work in Argentina examines the aesthetics of labor and farm technology in rural Argentina during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on fieldwork from Buenos Aires and Santa Fe rural regions, oral and life histories, material culture, archival material, and digital media, I demonstrate how factory owners and workers in rural regions shaped concepts of “freedom and work,” developing a community’s work values and demonstrating an optimistic vision of the future of work. This aesthetic seemingly diffuses and integrates with other broader social and labor movements in Argentina. Subjects’ memories of farm machinery, factory lifework, and the embodied experience of making, using, and repairing farm machinery reveal workers’ lived experiences and the cultural processes of developing identity, values, and history.

In 2017-2020, I directed the Middle Passage Experience, an interactive VR/AR simulation of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas during the late 18th to mid-19th centuries. This collaborative projects involves faculty and students across disciplines: History, Africana Studies, Games and Interactive Media, Digital Humanities, and Computer Science.

Latin American Technocultural Worlds: Histories of Design, Aesthetics, and Practice (Co-edited Volume)

I am co-editing a volume on aesthetics of technology in Latin America with award-winning author Diana J. Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis. The volume, Latin American Technocultural Worlds: Histories of Design, Aesthetics, and Practice, focuses on Latin American technological aesthetics and design through an in-depth exploration of state modernization projects for the urban and rural environments and individual users who reimagined or reconfigured the aesthetics of technological devices as these were domesticated in their context of use. Expanding the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries scholars in the volume (1) explore how these imaginaries are/were informed and are informed by the politics of design and aesthetics (2) underline the way these imaginaries are not only textual but visual and aural, (3) and, how users altered and reinvented the aesthetics/design of technological devices to meet their cultural and personal values, needs and desires. The group will be meeting online during 2022-2023: https://chstm.org/content/aesthetic-and-design-latin-american-technology-0

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