Brianna Birkel
Branching out & making adjustments
"I think I might need another year to figure this out..."
Geophysics
After three years of coursework and research in physics, I didn't feel like I was going in quite the right direction. As I continued to take anthropology and global health classes, I knew that I needed to do something where I felt like I was having more of an immediate impact. I really enjoyed doing physics, but it wasn't as fulfilling as I wanted it to be.
At the end of my junior year, I took a class in geophysics, and quickly realized the direction I needed to be going. Geophysics is the perfect balance of using physics to do something that felt "useful" to me (not to say that physics isn't - it is incredibly important and useful - it just doesn't have the same sort of immediate impact that you can get from geophysics and seismology. The following is my final project from my first geophysics class, taught by Dr. Ken Creager. Dr. Creager quickly became a sort of unofficial advisor for me, and I am incredibly indebted to him for helping me into the field and the geophysics community.
After this first class, I quickly moved into upper level seismology classes, including a graduate level theoretically seismology class (side note: I apparently was the only undergrad in the 10-year history of this class to take it!). Below is one of our homeworks, which is pretty obviously more technically complex than the first geophysics class I took. I was very lucky to have the physics background I do, as this made it so that I could move ahead fairly quickly in geophysics classes.
Other SUPER Events
Starting the year off right at the Dawg Days RSO Fair!
Palestinian food demonstration with ASUW Food Co-op:
Rally to call for the release of Ahed Tamimi from an Israeli prison - Ahed is a 16 year old girl who was arrested for slapping a soldier after he shot her 15-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet at close range. Ahed was detained for three months without trial, at which point she was sentenced to eight months in prison and fined over $1400.
Poster for Palestine Awareness Week 2018, a week full of events to teach the UW community about Palestinian culture and resistance:
Palestinian Cultural Resistance and Solidarity Festival
One of the things I am most proud of from my time at UW is our second annual Palestinian Cultural Resistance and Solidarity Festival, which I was a head organizer for. This was a huge event with several hundred people in attendance, where we celebrated Palestinian culture and resistance and supported our fellow indigenous activists. I helped in organizing food, vendors, performers, scheduling, ticketing and more for this event, and it was a huge success!
I also had the opportunity to dance dabke (traditional Palestinian dance), as seen in the picture below:
I also painted some pottery (below) with traditional Palestinian designs and made radical buttons to sell as a fundraiser for SUPER.
A beautiful tapestry hung up at our event:
The poster I created to publicize the event:
This event was a massive undertaking, and was an absolutely incredible and rewarding as my final big event with SUPER. I feel that this event did an excellent job of both informing people about Palestinian resistance and celebrating our culture and community. I am so grateful to my fellow activists for all of their hard work; this was a beautiful way for us to do the work we wanted to do, but also to celebrate with each other.
P.S. If you want to see me actually doing dabke, here is a video from one of our team practices!
Remix as Resistance
Below is a project I did for a class called "Remix as Resistance," which approached the ways in which different forms of remixed media are used to resist societal norms. The remix below was something that I chose to put together not long after the 2016 election; I chose to create this remix as a way to resist and push back against the misogyny that was rampant during and after the election.
Unleashed! A Cappella
Video of me singing Bohemian Rhapsody with some friends from Unleashed! A Cappella:
Introductory Arabic
My fourth year, I also really tried to branch out and stretch myself in learning completely new and different subjects. One of these was learning Arabic! This was definitely a very difficult class for me. Below are my final projects for winter and spring quarters: a presentation on my favorite Arabic poets and a video demonstration of how to make Mujaddara, a traditional Palestinian dish.