The Fall 2020 coordinating editors of Paprika! stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the BIPOC members of the design community who continue to lead efforts to confront our discipline’s historic shortcomings and violent complicity in the structures of racial injustice and social precarity. The ground on which our community and discipline stands must be thoroughly reevaluated, and we now face many challenging, urgent questions on the way forward.
Although Paprika! proudly maintains an editorial distance from the exclusive institution in which it is based, we recognize that this is not sufficient to relieve our publication’s culpability in reinscribing the constructs of whiteness pervasive across all aspects of the Yale community. We take seriously the responsibility that we have, as editors and students, to acknowledge, unlearn, and redress the structural racism built into our institutions, our relationships, and ourselves. The work we must all do operates on multiple, transdisciplinary scales of critical reflection, immediate action and long-term planning—yet our existing platforms of communication feel ill-equipped to perform agily along all these fronts. Paprika! is looking a little more like... Paprika?
We feel that these pressing questions could empower a continued exclamation. Paprika? is a new platform—a living repository that responds to and holds space for the vital ephemera emerging in and around the rapidly expanding and shifting currents of public health, social justice, and our student community’s experience. It is crucial not to isolate such conversations in a “genre” of discourse. The mission of Paprika? is to foreground and fully integrate these in a constellation of new forms of content generated by and for the community. Paprika? is academic only when necessary and is available to a broad audience on a new dedicated bulletin website and weekly newsletter that serve as a rolling, ad hoc house to convene on discontinuity, precarity and justice.
Hannah Mayer Baydoun, M.Arch 1 2022, (she/her)
Audrey Tseng Fischer, M.Arch 1 2022 (they/them)
Alex Kim, MED 2021 (he/him)
Brian Orser, M.Arch 1 2022 (he/him)