Krystal Laryea is a cultural and organizational sociologist. Her research examines the micro and meso level foundations of meaning, belonging, and integration in groups, organizations, and cities. The aim of her work is to shed light on the social processes that allow people to build relationships, communities, and institutions across lines of difference.
Her current book, Belonging in college: How students manage marginality in elite universities, explores how people navigate the quintessential experience of being cultural outsiders through a comparative ethnographic study of an Evangelical Christian community and a nonprofit that serves working-class students of color at Stanford and UC Berkeley. She is beginning a new project on how people pursue paths of “voluntary downward mobility,” where they make economically costly choices in order to live more meaningful and/or relationally robust lives.
Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, Qualitative Sociology, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Mobilization, The Journal of Higher Education, Nature Cities, VOLUNTAS, and Global Perspectives. She completed her PhD at Stanford University in 2024 and was a Faculty Fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute of Ethics and the Common Good in 2024-25.