February 2023: Dr. Japonica Brown-Saracino (CAS Sociology)
Japonica Brown-Saracino is an ethnographer who specializes in urban and community sociology, cultural sociology, and the study of gender and sexualities. Recent projects include an ethnography of dyke bar commemoration in four U.S. cities, with related articles published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies (2020) and American Journal of Sociology (2021). The 2021 article received honorable mention for best article from the Community and Urban Section of the ASA. With collaborators, Brown-Saracino recently published a study of museum representations of gender and sexualities, and, with Robin Bartram, she is at work on a study of gender and housing. Brown-Saracino has served as Vice-President of the Eastern Sociological Society, and as chair of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. She currently serves on the Culture Council of the American Sociological Association, as an associate editor of Social Problems, and as a member of the ASR editorial board. At BU she serves as Chair of Sociology and directs the Urban Inequalities Workshop, which is sponsored by the Initiative on Cities, where she serves as a Faculty Fellow. Learn more about Professor Brown-Saracino in her full feature below!
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
I am not sure that I decided to be a social scientist; it seems to me that a series of happy accidents led me to my career in sociology. From the very start, I had parents who expressed curiosity about how the natural and social worlds operate. My mother was a social worker and a feminist organizer, and my father was a pharmacist who had also studied environmental science. Our dinner table conversations spanned political, social, and environmental issues, and often included questions about animal behavior and plant biology. Together, these intersecting threads nurtured my curiosity about how things come to be and why they change, as well as my interest in developing methods for answering related questions.
Second, I was lucky enough to find my way to Smith College, where I took many memorable courses in the social sciences – from urban sociology to seminars on gender and sexualities, and terrific history courses on a variety of subjects. Expectations for students were high, and I came out of those classrooms steeped in recent literature in the social sciences, and familiar with the variety of methods that social scientists rely on. I was also lucky enough to have the opportunity to write a senior thesis, an ethnography of the gentrification of my rural hometown. Through that research process, I became entranced by qualitative methods, and by how sustained engagement with people could generate meaningful answers to my research questions.
In my senior year at Smith, I applied to PhD programs in Sociology, but I ultimately decided to defer graduate school. I moved to New Orleans, where I worked as a researcher for a nonprofit organization. While I met many wonderful people in that position and learned a great deal from my time in New Orleans, I recognized that my research interests were best-suited for a PhD program, so I ultimately reapplied to graduate programs in Sociology.
An undergraduate mentor encouraged me to apply to Northwestern, where he believed I would find faculty and students who shared my interests in culture, cities, community, and qualitative methods. At Northwestern, I was encouraged to ask precisely the kind of questions that have been the cornerstones of all of my projects to date: How do social actors make sense of the social world? How do social structures influence how we perceive the world around us, and how do our attitudes and beliefs shape those structures? How do communities form and disband? The intellectual nourishment, support, and encouragement that I received at Northwestern created a pathway to the career as a researcher and educator that I had dreamed of, and I am incredibly grateful that I found my way to Chicago.
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
I recently completed an ethnographic study of dyke bar commemoration in four U.S. cities. I studied dyke bar commemorative efforts in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. I sought to understand why commemorators seek to remember bars that many of them never attended, and also why they celebrate bars when many commemorators are critical of how bars failed to be fully inclusive. Articles from the project have appeared in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and the American Journal of Sociology. I am also at work on a book on gentrification, which is under advance contract with Princeton University Press. Finally, with my collaborator, Robin Bartram (Tulane University), I’m in the early stages of a multi-method project on gender and housing in the U.S.
What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?
As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I was encouraged to pursue my curiosities. No one second guessed my research questions or suggested that I adopt more modest research designs. I try to embody the spirit of that supportive and generous mentorship from which I benefited. I aim to tell my own students that if they are truly curious about something and have a question that existing literature cannot answer, then they should endeavor to conduct the study of their dreams. If one is committed to a project and genuinely fascinated by the subject, I find that the odds are high that the project will succeed.
What is your favorite course you’ve taught at BU?
Since I arrived at BU in 2011, I have routinely taught Boston’s People and Neighborhoods. I love using Boston as a case for exploring core themes of urban sociology, and I always look forward to exploring neighborhoods on foot with my undergraduate students. I have also long taught the Sociology department’s graduate qualitative methods course; I aim to build an enduring intellectual community in the course that provides resources as students practice conducting qualitative research, debate how to evaluate qualitative findings, and construct their own research designs. Finally, more recently I’ve taught an advanced undergraduate/graduate seminar, Sex & the City, which explores interdisciplinary themes on sexualities, gender, and places that are closely related to my recent research.
Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.
I was named after a flower. I grew up in rural western Massachusetts in the 1980s, and until college I did not fully grasp that having a botanical name was unusual or surprising.