Dr. Rocha Beardall is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Her research advances a theoretical framework for understanding how settler colonialism operates through law, labor, and institutions to organize violence, exclusion, and resistance. Her work integrates political sociology, law and society, race and ethnicity, the sociology of work, and Native and Indigenous studies. Using mixed-methods approaches combining ethnography, archival work, and legal analysis with quantitative data, she demonstrates how legal contracts and administrative coordination arrangements in policing, child welfare, and tribal governance constitute durable governance regimes that routinize harm and suppress democratic accountability.
Her forthcoming book, The Thick Green Line: How Police Labor Rights Harm Communities, Limit Reform, and Sustain a System of Impunity, advances a field-reframing theory of transactional policing and establishes the thick green line as a new analytic framework for understanding state violence as labor governance. The book treats police power as a labor regime and argues that cities convert coercive force into protected work through union contracts, civil service rules, personnel codes, and administrative law. Drawing on nine years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Syracuse, New York, the book documents how union leaders, city attorneys, and municipal officials route allegations of violence through grievance and arbitration channels that preserve pay, position, and pension. Through this framework, the book revises prevailing accounts of reform failure by demonstrating how legal and labor infrastructures convert political crisis into administrative continuity, and it identifies concrete sites of intervention for those seeking to confront police labor power at the level of contract and municipal governance.
Building directly on this policing-centered analytic, Dr. Rocha Beardall shows how settler-colonial governance operates through law enforcement, legal contracts, and administrative infrastructures in both urban jurisdictions and Indian Country as a unified governance regime that erodes and contains tribal sovereignty through jurisdictional fragmentation and contractual rule. Her work on the Indian Child Welfare Act demonstrates how state agencies selectively comply with federal placement preferences and how bureaucratic discretion channels Native children into foster care and adoption systems that weaken tribal jurisdiction. Her research on policing in Indian Country further demonstrates how jurisdictional complexity, federal contracting regimes, and intergovernmental law enforcement agreements heighten exposure to police violence while constraining tribal authority to regulate public safety. Another line of research examines treaties, land claims, higher-education partnerships, and tribal business agreements as legal instruments that appear neutral yet funnel Native nations into overlapping systems of surveillance, extraction, and state violence. Together, these lines of inquiry constitute a unified account of how legal and administrative governance sustains settler colonial domination while delimiting Indigenous self-determination.
Dr. Rocha Beardall’s scholarship translates sustained community-engaged research into policy-relevant sociological analysis and intervention. In Syracuse, she worked alongside residents, organizers, and public officials to document how police labor rights shape daily encounters, budget decisions, and city oversight. In her ICWA research, she partners with tribal child welfare professionals and the National Indian Child Welfare Association’s Protect ICWA campaign to generate applied evidence that strengthens tribal authority in courts, agencies, and legislatures. Through this work, she produces community-centered research reports, contributes to legal and legislative briefs, and provides advisory consultation to municipal and tribal leaders on police accountability, labor governance, and Indigenous child welfare reform.
Dr. Rocha Beardall received her J.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 2019. Her research appears in high-impact interdisciplinary journals, including Criminology, Punishment & Society, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal.
Her research has been recognized with generous funding from the Ford Foundation (2023-2024), the William T. Grant Foundation (2021-2024), and the Spencer Foundation (2021-2022). She is especially honored to have received the international Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Article Prize (2022) and the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Distinguished Early Career Award (2022). She is a finalist for the William T. Grant Scholars Program Class of 2031, a nationally competitive fellowship recognizing scholars whose research advances theory, evidence, and policy on youth inequality.
CONTACT
I collaborate with scholars, students, politicians, journalists, and community organizers on various projects about policing, family policing, and social inequality.
I also respond to requests for speaking engagements and expert witness services.
If setting up a time to meet on such issues would be helpful, please feel free to get in touch at tyrb@uw.edu.