Theresa Rocha Beardall, associate professor of sociology, was named a William T. Grant Scholar, one of seven researchers nationwide selected for the program this year. The award supports promising early-career researchers as they expand their expertise into new disciplines, methods, or content areas. Each William T. Grant Scholar receives $425,000 over five years.
Rocha Beardall’s research bridges the areas of race, law, inequality, policing, child welfare, 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, with the goal of helping to reduce and reverse these systemic inequalities.
With the Grant Scholars award, Rocha Beardall will reconstruct the histories of Native children affected by federal Indian boarding schools in Washington State by locating, digitizing, and linking records scattered across archives, with UW student researchers helping retrieve and catalog those materials. She will work under the direction of the Puyallup Tribal Historic Preservation Department, supporting tribally governed research and curriculum development while developing new expertise in Indigenous data sovereignty and supervised machine learning.
“This award comes at an especially meaningful moment in my career because it lets me extend a question that has shaped my research for years in entirely new methodological directions,” says Rocha Beardall. “Across my work, I have examined how Native nations exercise political authority within institutions that may recognize Native people while still constraining tribal authority, including through the systems that determine what information is collected, how it is classified, and how it shapes decisions. What excites me most is the question of what becomes actionable when Native nations govern the production and use of knowledge concerning their own citizens, histories, and governing institutions.”