Japonica Brown-Saracino is an ethnographer who specializes in urban and community sociology, cultural sociology, and the study of sexualities. Her most recent book, How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities, was published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press. The book draws on her comparative ethnography of four small cities with growing or emerging populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer women. It highlights how city ecology shapes social interactions, and, ultimately, how we understand ourselves and the groups to which we belong. Articles from the project have appeared in Social Problems (2011), Qualitative Sociology (2014), Sexualities (2017), and American Journal of Sociology (2015). Her 2015 AJS article received the Jane Addams Award for best article from the Community and Urban Section of the American Sociological Association.

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), and, with collaborators, a study of museum representations of gender and sexualities.

Brown-Saracino has served as Vice-President of the Eastern Sociological Society; secretary/treasurer and chair of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; as co-book review editor for City & Community; and as a consulting editor for the American Journal of Sociology. At BU she directs the Urban Inequalities Workshop, which is sponsored by the Initiative on Cities.