Hi there. My name is Jermaine Anthony Richards. I am a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where I am a Dean’s Endowed Dissertation Fellow of the USC Graduate School. I study institutional power in the communication and media industries — in particular, how organizations define social problems and then assign value and virtue to games, virtual worlds, and other experimental media, whether as objects, environments, or practices, as adequate responses to them.

My dissertation is theoretically grounded in Black studies and located in the critical-cultural communication and media studies political economy tradition, with an inflection from science and technology studies (STS). It examines how organizations institutionalize and industrialize civic categories, and how those categories shape which problems are worthy of engagement, investment, and interaction. The project rests on a relational database I engineered, which serves as its archive and helps direct the inquiry. Robeson Taj Frazier chairs my dissertation committee; other members include Henry Jenkins, Cristina Mejia Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm (SCA: Interactive Media and Games), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Duke University - Program in Literature).

My scholarship also draws on nearly two decades of professional experience spanning creative advertising, media production, and international technology and development policy. I began working on Madison Avenue at age thirteen through a specialized New York City high school founded in partnership with advertising agencies and their holding companies (Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis). I subsequently worked in strategy, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch for nearly a decade before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer. There, among other projects, I was the credited producer of Hair Nah, a viral browser game about a Black woman traveling while people try to touch her hair.

My work in virtual, simulated, and synthetic environments, however, began much earlier. In Second Life, I founded a company devoted to production, curation, and publishing, which I led as its principal for nearly a decade alongside my formative studies. Most notably, I directed a first-of-its-kind, feature-length film adaptation of a ballet staged virtually in Second Life. The ballet was based on John Milton’s seventeenth-century theological epic Paradise Lost, which retells the biblical account of the Fall of Man in Genesis. The film was highly praised. One critic praised its cinematography and editing, calling it “a work of remarkable skill and passion” and stating that it “[p]erhaps it represents a new benchmark for Second Life machinima.”

These experiences deepened my interest in how communication, computation, and organization influence the ways people approach political, philosophical, and theological questions. After graduate study at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), I served as a Summer Associate at New America, a Washington, DC-based think tank, where I worked on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure. I subsequently became a Fellow in the organization’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative.

As a Fellow, I led research and co-authored a landscape analysis of digital transformation and governance. I also led the development of the Catalog of Digital Solutions in the Lower Mekong Region. The catalog addressed an information gap on how digital solutions respond to social, economic, and sustainability challenges across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The study examined the emerging field of digital public infrastructure while attending to surveillance, censorship, and threats to fundamental freedoms, including internet freedom, that hinder people-centered development in the region. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded the research. I subsequently drew on findings from the Mekong report in Fair Observer to examine Jamaica’s digital disaster infrastructure.

My scholarly writing includes contributions to the International Journal of Communication and The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture, edited by Kinitra Brooks (Michigan State) and Nicholas Jones (Yale). I regularly present at conferences of the American Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the International Communication Association.

I hold degrees and certificates in science and technology studies, communication, global communication, global media, communications technology, and studio art from the London School of Economics and Political Science, USC Annenberg, and York College of the City University of New York.