Theresa Rocha Beardall

Dr. Theresa Rocha Beardall is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University in 2019 and her J.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014. Dr. Rocha Beardall’s research bridges the areas of race, law, inequality, policing, family policing, indigeneity, and tribal sovereignty. Her scholarship is motivated by a commitment to better understand how law, legal institutions, and legal actors marginalize select racial groups in order to help reduce and reverse these systemic inequalities. Her research has appeared in Criminology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal among other venues. She is currently working on her first book examining the political economy of policing in race-class subjugated communities and conducting a three-year study funded by the William T. Grant Foundation exploring how tribal sovereignty can be leveraged to protect Native youth and families in the child welfare system.