Theresa Rocha Beardall is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Her research examines policing, Native sovereignty, and child welfare through a shared focus on political authority. Across these areas, she studies how communities challenge state power, how institutions respond, and why governing arrangements can persist as institutions change.

Theresa’s policing research asks what happens when communities demand accountability from coercive institutions. In The Thick Green Line, under advance contract with the University of California Press, she develops a theory of transactional policing that studies police power as a labor regime. Drawing on seven years of research in Syracuse, New York, the book shows how union contracts, civil service rules, and administrative law route allegations of police violence through employment systems. A fight over who has power over a community can become a fight over who has power over a contract. She also shows how legitimacy regimes suppress civilian oversight while appearing responsive to it (Criminology) and how civil legal remedies can recognize an injury without shifting the authority that produced it (Punishment & Society). Her current research shows how fragmented governance disperses police oversight across multiple bodies that sidestep public demands, and how police discipline systems can be designed to punish damage to a patrol car more reliably than harm to a civilian.

Her research on Native sovereignty examines how Native nations exercise inherent authority amid federal, state, and local efforts to define or constrain its scope. Her early work shows how disputes over tribal court jurisdiction become judgments about the legitimacy of Native governments (Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance). Later work shows how struggles over Native authority extend beyond courts into economic institutions (Native American and Indigenous Studies), administrative systems (Native American and Indigenous Studies), and public understandings of sovereignty (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity).

Across these projects, she studies institutional succession, asking how governing projects outlast the institutions that once carried them, what later institutions inherit from earlier forms of rule, and when those inheritances are transformed or disrupted. In policing, a national study finds that American Indian and Alaska Native people face sharply elevated risk of fatal police violence in and around reservations, where jurisdictional fragmentation, surveillance, and structural disinvestment reflect enduring features of settler governance (PNAS). Her child-welfare research shows wide variation across states in whether Native children are placed in ICWA-preferred homes (Children and Youth Services Review). Her research on land-grant universities shows how institutions built through Indigenous dispossession can publicly recognize Native peoples while continuing practices of removal (American Educational Research Journal).

Her comparative-historical research traces anti-Indigenous governance across nineteenth-century Indian agents, federal boarding schools, twentieth-century child welfare, and contemporary institutions. She asks how political projects outlast the institutions that once carried them, what later organizations inherit from earlier forms of rule, and when communities and Native nations can transform or disrupt those inheritances.

As a William T. Grant Scholar (2026-2031), Theresa is testing these questions through Who Decides What We Teach? Indian Boarding Schools and the Native Fight for Educational Justice in Washington State. In partnership with the Puyallup Tribal Historic Preservation Department, the project reconstructs histories of federal Indian boarding schools under tribal data governance and follows the Nation’s work to shape how Native history is taught in surrounding public schools. The project traces a struggle over authority in Native education, from federal efforts to control Native children through schooling to contemporary exercises of tribal authority over historical knowledge.

Theresa earned her PhD in Sociology from Cornell University and her JD from the University of Illinois College of Law. Her research has been supported by the William T. Grant Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Spencer Foundation.