Brianna Birkel
Work hard, play hard
"Someone remind me, why am I working this hard again?"
Decolonize UW Rally
The following set of pictures is from what was probably the biggest student rally I ever participated in while at UW. Groups from all across campus came together to demand that the UW divest from private for-profit prisons and inform the student body about how all of the furniture we use at UW is built by prison labor, for which prisoners get virtually no compensation.
At the Board of Regents meeting where students, TAs and faculty demanded that the UW divest from private prison labor:
Hundreds of students shutting down traffic at Montlake and Pacific to disrupt "business as usual":
Die-in at the intersection of 45th and Memorial Dr. for 4 minutes to memoralize the 4 hours Mike Brown laid bleeding in the street after being shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson:
SUPER Events 2016
2016 Nakba Display commemorating the displacement and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Each sign has the name of a Palestinian village that was destroyed by the Israeli state, plus several signs with a timeline of Palestinian history since the early 20th century.
A couple photos from Israeli Apartheid Week 2016:
Intro to Global Health
Mostly a lot of core physics classes this year, but I did write an interesting assignment on global health in Afghanistan, including a pitch to the Global Fund for increased public health spending. After taking many other global health and anthropology classes, I know that this is not the best way to help oppressed people in other countries; it is unacceptable for those of us in the US to try to make decisions about what other countries may or may not need. Instead, it is much more important and productive to listen to those suffering in those countries, and work from there. This said, it was an interesting and eye-opening assignment for me at the time.
Some other neat things
I got to meet Randall Munroe (author of xkcd) and Hank Green!
I also got to see and meet (and get an autograph from) one of my very favorite artists of all time, Frank Turner!
LIGO Trip
I was also very fortunate this year to get to visit the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) just after the first discovery of gravitational waves! Below is the control room, one leg of the miles-long tunnel that is used to detect gravitational waves, and me with my friend Spencer just outside of Hanford.