Alyson Bradley

Alyson W. Bradley is a licensed attorney, currently serving as an Assistant Attorney General in the Juvenile Litigation Division at the Washington State Office of the Attorney General. Bradley hails from Blue Island, Illinois – a charming and familiar suburban town just outside of Chicago. Although born in Tacoma, Washington, she moved to Chicago as an infant and spent much of her childhood and adolescence between there and Puerto Rico, before eventually remaining in Chicago and later finding her way back to the Pacific Northwest.

A graduate of DePaul University, Bradley spent her final year in Mérida, Yucatán, México studying anthropology and the politics of food. During her time there, she contributed to a cookbook that reimagined traditional Latin American food, pairing recipes with insightful and at times, unsettling, epistemological analyses. After returning to the U.S., she attended The John Marshall Law School, earning her JD in 2012, an LLM in Trial Advocacy and Dispute Resolution in 2014, and was admitted to the Illinois State Bar in 2013.

Her career began with Adult Protective Services in Chicago, and in 2015, she transitioned to working as a volunteer attorney for the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services (IDCFS). Not knowing how rich working for free could be, Bradley unexpectedly found herself exactly where she needed to be. What began as volunteer work soon turned into a three-year learning experience where she honed her expertise in juvenile and administrative law. Bradley represented IDCFS, trained foster parents, and led numerous task forces focused on critical issues such as commercial exploitation and trafficking, unaccompanied minors, adult youth with disabilities, the rights of youth in care, and educational excellence & equity.

In 2018, seeking something more, Bradley sought a new challenge and joined the Peace Corps as a youth development facilitator in Perú. Her two years of service exposed her to the field of international development, sparking her interest in the intersection between development and child protection. Inspired by her Indigenous and Puerto Rican ancestry, she began exploring the relationship between systems of care and Afro-Peruvian and Indigenous children in Perú. Though not part of the original assignment, it sparked a curiosity and growing excitement to explore Perú’s rich diversity of knowledge.

In 2021, Bradley pursued her research further by earning a second LLM in Sustainable International Development at the University of Washington, where she also gained admission to the Washington State Bar in 2022. Through this program, she critically examined the dynamic between development and child protection, exploring both the conflicts and opportunities for reimagination.

Now, as a PhD student at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Bradley has the opportunity to deepen her research in Perú. Her work focuses on learning from and with the children these systems aim to protect, utilizing a decolonial framework. Her research and teaching interests include race, ethnicity, and coloniality; identity and culture; Indigenous politics; care and human rights; sustainable development; legal anthropology; and comparative law and legal cultures.

Alyson is multilingual, speaking Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Patois. In her personal life, she is a passionate football fan, enjoys being in, on and under the water, thrives on adventure, and has a deep love for music and dance. She is also a proud auntie to nine magnificent and wonderous nieces and nephews, and has the incredible honor, privilege and pleasure of being an auntie/big sister figure to three more extraordinary and magical young humans.