Guest lecturer Japonica Brown-Saracino is professor of sociology at Boston University. She is the author of many articles about LGBT placemaking and gentrification, and books including, How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities (University of Chicago Press 2018) and A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity (University of Chicago Press, 2009).