Theresa Rocha Beardall
Biographic Data
| ID | 915326 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Theresa Rocha Beardall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Theresa Rocha |
| FAMILY NAME | Beardall |
| SIGNATURE | BEARDALL T R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7209-0373 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Inclusive Elimination
Native nations in the United States hold inherent sovereignty. Yet, many White Americans oppose this political authority. Drawing on thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 558 White Americans reacting to 10 real-world sovereignty scenarios, we identify the ideological mechanism through which this opposition works, which we call inclusive elimination. Inclusive elimination dissolves Native nations’ separate political authority not b…
Indigenous Abolition and the Third Space of Indian Child Welfare
This article introduces the Third Space of Indian child welfare to theorize how Indigenous nations simultaneously engage and disrupt settler legal systems while building sovereign, care-based alternatives. Drawing from legal analysis, Indigenous political thought, and sociohistorical synthesis, I trace the historical continuity from boarding schools to today’s foster care removals, showing how child welfare operates as a colonial apparatus of fam…
Indigenous Data Inclusion and the Colonial Politics of Recognition
The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. disproportionately harmed Indigenous peoples and brought long-standing calls for increased data collection and data accuracy about systemic issues in Indian Country to national attention. Advocates believe data can help support Indigenous people and address past harms. However, we explore two consequences that arise from data inclusion within the context of Indigenous peoples' relationship with the U.S. colonial …
Intersectional Burdens
Administrative decisions mediate whether the millions who turn to the state for social services annually can access the assistance they need. We introduce the concept of intersectional burdens —which describes how a person’s social location (including race, class, gender, age, and ability) shapes their access and use of state benefits and programs—to account for the ways mutually reinforcing systems structure experiences with the state and to bet…
Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows
This study draws from W. E. B. Du Boi’s urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addres…
Legal reality or legal mirage? Examining the relationship between police violence, legal consciousness, and the promise of civil legal justice
Race-and-class-subjugated communities continue to experience disproportionate police violence despite increased attention to this longstanding problem. This study examines how residents make sense of the legal issues that arise from these encounters and turn to civil law for assistance. I do so by unifying scholarship on police encounters, legal consciousness, and access to justice to consider the obstacles everyday people encounter when they con…
American Indian and Alaska Native overexposure to foster care and family surveillance in the US
Abolition as Praxis and Virtual Community-Based Learning
The distressing events of 2020 challenged the United States to reimagine how our social institutions can and should respond to demands for racial justice. These demands impacted higher education and debates arose about whether the classroom is an appropriate place for teaching abolition. I address this debate by introducing a senior-level elective course, Policing in the American City, to explore how abolitionist pedagogy can guide our teaching, …
Structured Discomfort
We know that teaching sociology can be difficult in an era of extreme polarization. By engaging “structured discomfort” as a teaching strategy, we can empower students to think critically about how multiple social institutions interact and interlock to create social inequality. This approach uses three key organizing principles to activate learning on controversial topics: 1) build intentional classroom culture that promotes respect and empathy; …
Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities
Moments of performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, often fail to reckon with long-standing demands against injustice from communities of color. In the case of Indigenous Peoples in higher education, these demands frequently include an end to derogatory mascots and racialized campus violence. This article attends to those issues by merging and extending settler-colonial theory and racialized organization theory to examine …
Promoting Empathy and Reducing Hopelessness Using Contemplative Practices
Contemplative practices are becoming more common in educational environments for attending to whole-student learning, fostering empathy, and promoting social justice and socially just pedagogues. This conversation explores how holistic approaches facilitate and expand the parameters of sociological pedagogy to integrate humanist pedagogies and initiate emancipatory citizenship. By building a pedagogical bridge between sociology and contemplative …
Police legitimacy regimes and the suppression of citizen oversight in response to police violence
A lack of formal accountability in the aftermath of police violence against communities of color has long fueled public demands for increased police oversight. Yet, little is known about how interorganizational relationships affect citizen complaint investigations once citizen review boards (CRBs) are established. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival sources about the Syracuse Citizen Review Board in New York State, I show …
Sovereignty for Sale? Tribal Patent Shelters and the Risky Business of Sovereign Derivatives
Sovereign tribal nations frequently conduct business with public and private entities. These transactions include routine transfers of goods and services, as well as more creative extraction technologies that locate revenue streams within tribal communities in desperate need of economic resources. One form of creative extraction involves tribal patent shelters. With this unique and emerging business partnership, nontribal corporations compensate …
Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare
Family separation is a defining feature of the U.S. government’s policy to forcibly assimilate and dismantle American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) tribal nations. The historical record catalogues the violence of this separation in several ways, including the mass displacement of Native children into boarding schools throughout the 19th century and the widespread adoption of Native children into non-Native homes in the 20th century. This legacy…
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
In June 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, a case involving an American Indian child and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Despite the uncontested fact that Baby Veronica is indeed an “Indian child” as defined by both ICWA and the Cherokee Nation, the Supreme Court decision reveals deep, historical anxieties regarding race and political status as it summarizes Baby Veronica’s Indian stat…
What Then Remains of the Sovereignty of the Indians? The Significance of Social Closure and Ambivalence in Dollar General v. Mississippi Choctaw
The United States was erected on the lands of Native peoples. This fact has bedeviled American law courts since the nation’s founding. Native peoples have never abandoned their desire to exercise sovereign authority over those lands and the United States has never recognized the full extent of the tribes’ desires. For two centuries, the resolution of that conflict has been the American nation’s acceptance of Indian communities as distinctive, fed…
Police legitimacy regimes and the suppression of citizen oversight in response to police violence
A lack of formal accountability in the aftermath of police violence against communities of color has long fueled public demands for increased police oversight. Yet, little is known about how interorganizational relationships affect citizen complaint investigations once citizen review boards (CRBs) are established. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival sources about the Syracuse Citizen Review Board in New York State, I show …
Promoting Empathy and Reducing Hopelessness Using Contemplative Practices
Contemplative practices are becoming more common in educational environments for attending to whole-student learning, fostering empathy, and promoting social justice and socially just pedagogues. This conversation explores how holistic approaches facilitate and expand the parameters of sociological pedagogy to integrate humanist pedagogies and initiate emancipatory citizenship. By building a pedagogical bridge between sociology and contemplative …
Intersectional Burdens
Administrative decisions mediate whether the millions who turn to the state for social services annually can access the assistance they need. We introduce the concept of intersectional burdens —which describes how a person’s social location (including race, class, gender, age, and ability) shapes their access and use of state benefits and programs—to account for the ways mutually reinforcing systems structure experiences with the state and to bet…
Abolition as Praxis and Virtual Community-Based Learning
The distressing events of 2020 challenged the United States to reimagine how our social institutions can and should respond to demands for racial justice. These demands impacted higher education and debates arose about whether the classroom is an appropriate place for teaching abolition. I address this debate by introducing a senior-level elective course, Policing in the American City, to explore how abolitionist pedagogy can guide our teaching, …
Indigenous Abolition and the Third Space of Indian Child Welfare
This article introduces the Third Space of Indian child welfare to theorize how Indigenous nations simultaneously engage and disrupt settler legal systems while building sovereign, care-based alternatives. Drawing from legal analysis, Indigenous political thought, and sociohistorical synthesis, I trace the historical continuity from boarding schools to today’s foster care removals, showing how child welfare operates as a colonial apparatus of fam…
Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows
This study draws from W. E. B. Du Boi’s urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addres…
Legal reality or legal mirage? Examining the relationship between police violence, legal consciousness, and the promise of civil legal justice
Race-and-class-subjugated communities continue to experience disproportionate police violence despite increased attention to this longstanding problem. This study examines how residents make sense of the legal issues that arise from these encounters and turn to civil law for assistance. I do so by unifying scholarship on police encounters, legal consciousness, and access to justice to consider the obstacles everyday people encounter when they con…
American Indian and Alaska Native overexposure to foster care and family surveillance in the US
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
In June 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, a case involving an American Indian child and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Despite the uncontested fact that Baby Veronica is indeed an “Indian child” as defined by both ICWA and the Cherokee Nation, the Supreme Court decision reveals deep, historical anxieties regarding race and political status as it summarizes Baby Veronica’s Indian stat…
What Then Remains of the Sovereignty of the Indians? The Significance of Social Closure and Ambivalence in Dollar General v. Mississippi Choctaw
The United States was erected on the lands of Native peoples. This fact has bedeviled American law courts since the nation’s founding. Native peoples have never abandoned their desire to exercise sovereign authority over those lands and the United States has never recognized the full extent of the tribes’ desires. For two centuries, the resolution of that conflict has been the American nation’s acceptance of Indian communities as distinctive, fed…
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
In June 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, a case involving an American Indian child and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Despite the uncontested fact that Baby Veronica is indeed an “Indian child” as defined by both ICWA and the Cherokee Nation, the Supreme Court decision reveals deep, historical anxieties regarding race and political status as it summarizes Baby Veronica’s Indian stat…
What Then Remains of the Sovereignty of the Indians? The Significance of Social Closure and Ambivalence in Dollar General v. Mississippi Choctaw
The United States was erected on the lands of Native peoples. This fact has bedeviled American law courts since the nation’s founding. Native peoples have never abandoned their desire to exercise sovereign authority over those lands and the United States has never recognized the full extent of the tribes’ desires. For two centuries, the resolution of that conflict has been the American nation’s acceptance of Indian communities as distinctive, fed…
Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare
Family separation is a defining feature of the U.S. government’s policy to forcibly assimilate and dismantle American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) tribal nations. The historical record catalogues the violence of this separation in several ways, including the mass displacement of Native children into boarding schools throughout the 19th century and the widespread adoption of Native children into non-Native homes in the 20th century. This legacy…
Structured Discomfort
We know that teaching sociology can be difficult in an era of extreme polarization. By engaging “structured discomfort” as a teaching strategy, we can empower students to think critically about how multiple social institutions interact and interlock to create social inequality. This approach uses three key organizing principles to activate learning on controversial topics: 1) build intentional classroom culture that promotes respect and empathy; …
Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities
Moments of performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, often fail to reckon with long-standing demands against injustice from communities of color. In the case of Indigenous Peoples in higher education, these demands frequently include an end to derogatory mascots and racialized campus violence. This article attends to those issues by merging and extending settler-colonial theory and racialized organization theory to examine …
Promoting Empathy and Reducing Hopelessness Using Contemplative Practices
Contemplative practices are becoming more common in educational environments for attending to whole-student learning, fostering empathy, and promoting social justice and socially just pedagogues. This conversation explores how holistic approaches facilitate and expand the parameters of sociological pedagogy to integrate humanist pedagogies and initiate emancipatory citizenship. By building a pedagogical bridge between sociology and contemplative …
Police legitimacy regimes and the suppression of citizen oversight in response to police violence
A lack of formal accountability in the aftermath of police violence against communities of color has long fueled public demands for increased police oversight. Yet, little is known about how interorganizational relationships affect citizen complaint investigations once citizen review boards (CRBs) are established. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival sources about the Syracuse Citizen Review Board in New York State, I show …
Sovereignty for Sale? Tribal Patent Shelters and the Risky Business of Sovereign Derivatives
Sovereign tribal nations frequently conduct business with public and private entities. These transactions include routine transfers of goods and services, as well as more creative extraction technologies that locate revenue streams within tribal communities in desperate need of economic resources. One form of creative extraction involves tribal patent shelters. With this unique and emerging business partnership, nontribal corporations compensate …
American Indian and Alaska Native overexposure to foster care and family surveillance in the US
Abolition as Praxis and Virtual Community-Based Learning
The distressing events of 2020 challenged the United States to reimagine how our social institutions can and should respond to demands for racial justice. These demands impacted higher education and debates arose about whether the classroom is an appropriate place for teaching abolition. I address this debate by introducing a senior-level elective course, Policing in the American City, to explore how abolitionist pedagogy can guide our teaching, …
Intersectional Burdens
Administrative decisions mediate whether the millions who turn to the state for social services annually can access the assistance they need. We introduce the concept of intersectional burdens —which describes how a person’s social location (including race, class, gender, age, and ability) shapes their access and use of state benefits and programs—to account for the ways mutually reinforcing systems structure experiences with the state and to bet…
Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows
This study draws from W. E. B. Du Boi’s urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addres…
Legal reality or legal mirage? Examining the relationship between police violence, legal consciousness, and the promise of civil legal justice
Race-and-class-subjugated communities continue to experience disproportionate police violence despite increased attention to this longstanding problem. This study examines how residents make sense of the legal issues that arise from these encounters and turn to civil law for assistance. I do so by unifying scholarship on police encounters, legal consciousness, and access to justice to consider the obstacles everyday people encounter when they con…
Indigenous Abolition and the Third Space of Indian Child Welfare
This article introduces the Third Space of Indian child welfare to theorize how Indigenous nations simultaneously engage and disrupt settler legal systems while building sovereign, care-based alternatives. Drawing from legal analysis, Indigenous political thought, and sociohistorical synthesis, I trace the historical continuity from boarding schools to today’s foster care removals, showing how child welfare operates as a colonial apparatus of fam…
Indigenous Data Inclusion and the Colonial Politics of Recognition
The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. disproportionately harmed Indigenous peoples and brought long-standing calls for increased data collection and data accuracy about systemic issues in Indian Country to national attention. Advocates believe data can help support Indigenous people and address past harms. However, we explore two consequences that arise from data inclusion within the context of Indigenous peoples' relationship with the U.S. colonial …
Inclusive Elimination
Native nations in the United States hold inherent sovereignty. Yet, many White Americans oppose this political authority. Drawing on thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 558 White Americans reacting to 10 real-world sovereignty scenarios, we identify the ideological mechanism through which this opposition works, which we call inclusive elimination. Inclusive elimination dissolves Native nations’ separate political authority not b…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Criminology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Indigenous (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Sovereignty (4 works)