Jermaine Anthony Richards is a critical media and communication scholar and PhD candidate (ABD) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and an OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow. He researches how digital media technologies are deployed to manage global crises; advises on digital infrastructure policy in the Global South (i.e., Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean); and produces deployable interventions in the form of media, art, and entertainment.
Richards’ dissertation examines video games' capacity for redress beyond empathy cultivation using a critical, cultural, and historical approaches. Robeson Taj Frazier, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Cristina Mejia Visperas support his work.
Richards earned his BS in Communications Technology and Studio Art at York College—CUNY. He studied digital systems architecture and engineering and their application in video games. The late Jamaican artist Margaret Rose Vendryes mentored his view of video games as instruments.
Richards began his career as a Motion, Interactive, and Branded Entertainment producer at Wieden+Kennedy, where he led the production of Momo Pixel's Hair Nah, a viral game critiquing racialized bodily invasion. The Tate Modern, V&A, and Smithsonian exhibited it; Vogue and The New York Times featured it; MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Goldsmiths, and Oxbridge regularly teach it for its contributions to cultural movements surrounding civil rights law enactment and policy implementation (i.e., the CROWN Act).
As a digital infrastructure policy analyst and advisor, Richards served as a New America Fellow. He researched digital transformation's impact on ethnic-gender minorities in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar/Burma, and Viet Nam, supported by Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
In his spare time, Richards works on developing his production studio, playing his drums and guitars, recording music, writing fiction, or publishing public thought pieces on the digital entertainment industry through the lens of corporate social responsibility, collaborative governance, and cross-sector infrastructure policy.
Read more about Jermaine Anthony’s journey here. Resume, CV, and references are available upon request. An Abridged bio is available here.