Increasing your Impact with Community Engaged Research

Spring 2026 Faculty Learning Community

"In Our Own Words": A Community-Driven Study of Language and Queer Community at the Sacramento LGBT Center

Reflection on Developing a Community-Engaged Research Project Plan

Brief description: This project initiates a community-engaged research partnership with the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, emerging from an upper-division linguistic anthropology course on Language and the Body (ANTH160). Rather than arriving with a predetermined research agenda, I aim to work collaboratively with the Center and its constituents to identify language-related needs where researcher and student involvement may be beneficial to the Center’s ongoing work.
The level of community engagement of my project falls somewhere between collaboration and deference, as I aim to let the Center and its stakeholders identify the language-related issues (e.g. translation, informing the public of LGBT issues, assessing community needs ethnographically) that would most benefit from researcher and student involvement. True to my anthropological training, the project will be guided by the emic perspectives that emerge through stakeholder conversations and needs assessments, which may themselves serve as a pilot study.
I envision training interested students in basic ethnographic methods so they can work independently and collaboratively with LGBT Center stakeholders — including employees, volunteers, service recipients, and allies — to develop their own research questions. The ultimate goal is to produce community-responsive materials, such as teach-ins, zines, and social media content, that directly address the needs and interests of the Center and its constituents.
A core component of this project will be training students in fieldwork ethics, particularly how to recognize and resist the extractivist logics that have historically shaped social science research by drawing on condensed versions of ethnographic methods coursework with a focus on decolonizing research practices. Regular check-ins with stakeholders will ensure that the work remains aligned with the Center's mission and vision, keeping community relationships strong and reciprocal.
As above, I think regular checkins with both stakeholders and student-researchers will be paramount to maintaining and transparent and equitable collaborative relationship.
Queer people are at the forefront of linguistic innovation while simultaneously facing marginalization through language — from pathologizing discourses to the refusal to recognize pronouns and self-appellation as markers of personhood — making them uniquely attuned to the ways language both empowers and oppresses. This project is broadly oriented toward linguistic justice for queer communities, though how that goal is pursued at various scales will ultimately be dictated by stakeholders.
I think the first step is identifying community members’ goals for our collaboration. As the LGBT Center is already doing great work to further social justice for queer people locally, I want to use my institutional affiliation, resources, and particular set of skills to come up with creative ways to support them in that work

Evidence of Course Design
[Volunteers of the Sacramento LGBT Community Center at Sacramento Pride — a reminder that this work is rooted in real community relationships, not just research agendas]	[Language and the Body course syllabus which inspired this CER]	[Queer people and allies celebrating Pride in Sacramento]

Moving Forward

The Faculty Learning Community has been an invaluable space for developing ideas that are still taking shape. One of its most immediate benefits has been the opportunity to think out loud — quite literally, through the community consultancy model. This was an invaluable part of the early stages of my conceptualization process. Talking through this framework helped me recognize how well it maps onto my training as an anthropologist — that the researcher's job at the outset is to listen rather than arrive with a preformed agenda. Hearing how others have navigated the tension between institutional timelines and community-paced relationship building gave me both practical strategies and a stronger vocabulary for describing my approach to colleagues, students, and community partners. I leave with a clearer sense not only of what I want to do, but of why doing it slowly and collaboratively is itself the point.

Faculty Biography
	Joyhanna Jung Yoo (she/they) is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Sacramento. She is a linguistic anthropologist whose research takes a semiotic approach to the study of language, race, and gender with a focus on transnational Asian/American popular culture. They have published in Gender and Language and Language in Society and recently co-edited a special issue on semiotic approaches to understanding the Korean Wave in the journal Signs and Society.

Sponsor
This work was supported by the Community Engagement Center.