Hi, I’m Jermaine Anthony Richards. My work as a critical scholar, creative producer, and relational artist spans film, video games, virtual worlds, and symbolic and information systems. I’m a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, on the political economy of global communication track. At USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, I’m affiliated with the Interactive Media and Games Division as Senior Producer and Research Manager of the Radical Play Lab.

I study institutional power in media industries, treating communication as its mechanism and examining how communication operates through the objects, environments, and practices of media and culture. The underlying question is who gets to set the rules and how that power travels. I distinguish institutions—rules, standards, and established practices—from organizations such as companies, agencies, and studios; power, as I use the word, is the ability to create institutions. I follow that power through organizations, focusing on computational, experimental, and participatory media and on how they reinscribe cultural and political conventions as “industries.” Video games and virtual worlds are central examples.

My dissertation asks how organizations institutionalize and industrialize civic categories, and how those categories, once established, come to determine which problems are worthy of investment and interaction. The project is grounded in Black studies, situated in critical-cultural communication and media studies, and inflected by science and technology studies. I engineered its archive as a relational database that helps direct the inquiry.

I’m completing the dissertation with support from a USC Graduate School Dean’s Endowed Dissertation Fellowship and a wonderful committee chaired by Robeson Taj Frazier. The other members are Henry Jenkins, Cristina Mejia Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media and Games, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson of Duke University’s Program in Literature.

I came to these questions through nearly two decades of work in creative advertising, media production, art practice, and international policy. My entry into Madison Avenue came at thirteen, through a New York City high school founded in partnership with advertising agencies and their holding companies: Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis. I went on to spend nearly a decade in strategy, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer. There, I was the credited producer of the original browser version of Hair Nah, a viral game about a Black woman who travels while people try to touch her hair. The game and later adaptations by other makers have been exhibited in museums and taught around the world.

I also spent nearly a decade working in synthetic environments as founder and principal of a production, curation, and publishing company in Second Life. From that period, I’m proudest of the feature-length Paradise Lost in Second Life: The Movie (2015), which I directed. The film adapts Basilique Performing Arts Company’s virtual dance-theater production, staged under Canary Beck’s direction and based on John Milton’s seventeenth-century theological epic retelling the Fall of Man from Genesis. A contemporary review praised its cinematography and editing, calling the film “a work of remarkable skill and passion” and suggesting it might set a new benchmark for Second Life machinima.

Directing the film left me with a question I couldn’t put down: how much do communication and organization shape the way people approach critical-cultural, philosophical, and theological questions? I took that question to the London School of Economics for graduate study, then to New America, a Washington, DC think tank. There, I began as a Summer Associate working on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure before becoming a Fellow in the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative.

As a Fellow, I led research for and co-authored a landscape analysis of digital transformation and governance and led development of the Catalog of Digital Solutions in the Lower Mekong Region. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded the study. The catalog addressed a gap: the lack of a clear picture of how digital solutions were responding to social, economic, and sustainability challenges across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. We treated digital public infrastructure as an emerging field, paying close attention to how surveillance, censorship, and threats to fundamental freedoms, including internet freedom, obstruct people-centered development in the region. I later drew on those findings in a Fair Observer essay on digital disaster infrastructure in Jamaica.

My training includes degrees and certificates from the London School of Economics and Political Science, USC Annenberg, and York College of the City University of New York. That training spans science and technology studies, communication, global communication, global media, communications technology, and studio art.

My writing has appeared in the International Journal of Communication; The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture, edited by Kinitra Brooks of Michigan State and Nicholas Jones of Yale; and Sine Qua Non: A Journal of Creative Writing. I regularly present at conferences of the American Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the International Communication Association. If you’re there, please come say hello.