Lydia Bean

Nice to meet you! I just joined the Baylor faculty as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. I'm so excited to be moving back to Texas! I call this state home, but I was actually born in Alberta, Canada. I majored in Spanish and Music at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. Then, I went on to get a Ph.D in Sociology at Harvard University. Ironically, I didn't take a single course in sociology until I started my Ph.D!

I became a sociologist because I got involved with a movement in my hometown, called Friends of Justice. In my first year of college, there was a drug sting that arrested over 16% of my town's Black adults. It turned out the arrests were based on the uncorroborated word of an undercover cop, who had likely forged evidence and invented many of the cases. Friends of Justice started as a faith-based, grassroots movement to make sure that everybody got fair trials. In college, I looked for research that would help me understand what had just happened in my town! I figured out that the people who did this kind of research were called sociologists, and so I set out to become one. During graduate school, I also helped build Friends of Justice into a nonprofit that organizes across Texas and the South.

My research is about how evangelical churches connect religious identity to civic and political participation. I understand this process by comparing evangelical churches in the United States to similar churches in Canada. I use ethnographic methods, which means that I learn about groups of people by hanging out with them and asking them questions. In the Science of Society ELG, you'll have a chance to try out ethnographic research, to answer questions that you have about the social world!

In my free time, I like to play guitar and sing. For the last four years, I played with a world music ensemble that played Bluegrass, Celtic, Persian, Indian, and Klezmer music. I'd love to learn about what kinds of music you enjoy!