Hi there. My name is Jermaine Anthony Richards, and I am a scholar, producer, and relational artist working across video, games, virtual worlds, and information systems. 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. I hold a dual affiliation with the School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media and Games Division, where I am Senior Producer and Research Manager of the Radical Play Game Design Lab. A USC Graduate School Dean’s Endowed Dissertation Fellowship supports the completion of my dissertation.

My subject is institutional power in and across communication and media industries. Following new institutional economics, I separate institutions from organizations: an institution is a rule, standard, or established practice, and power is the ability to create institutions. I study how that power moves through organizations, and how computational, experimental, and participatory media reinscribe cultural and political conventions as “industries.” These media include objects, environments, and practices such as video games and virtual worlds.

The dissertation is grounded in Black studies, situated in critical-cultural communication and media studies, and inflected by science and technology studies. It asks how organizations institutionalize and industrialize civic categories, and how those categories determine which problems are worthy of investment and interaction. Its archive is a relational database I engineered, which also helps direct the inquiry. Robeson Taj Frazier chairs my committee, whose other members include Henry Jenkins, Cristina Mejia Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm (USC School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media and Games Division), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Duke University, Program in Literature).

I came to these questions through nearly two decades of work in creative advertising, media production, and international policy. I began on Madison Avenue 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 then spent 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 Hair Nah, a viral browser game about a Black woman who travels while people try to touch her hair. The game and its later adaptations have been exhibited in museums and taught worldwide.

My work in virtual, simulated, and synthetic environments began earlier still. In Second Life, I founded a company devoted to production, curation, and publishing, and led it as principal for nearly a decade alongside my studies. Most notably, I directed a first-of-its-kind feature-length film adaptation of a ballet staged virtually in Second Life and based on Paradise Lost, John Milton’s seventeenth-century theological epic retelling the Fall of Man from Genesis. One critic praised the film’s cinematography and editing, called it “a work of remarkable skill and passion,” and suggested it might mark “a new benchmark for Second Life machinima.”

That work deepened my interest in how communication and organization shape the ways people approach critical cultural, philosophical, and theological questions. After graduate study at the London School of Economics, I joined New America, a Washington, DC, think tank, as a Summer Associate working on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure. I then became a Fellow in its 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. The catalog addressed a gap in what was known about how digital solutions respond to social, economic, and sustainability challenges across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The study treated digital public infrastructure as an emerging field. It also attended to the 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, and I later drew on its findings in a Fair Observer essay on digital disaster infrastructure in Jamaica.

My scholarly writing appears in the International Journal of Communication, The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture, edited by Kinitra Brooks (Michigan State) and Nicholas Jones (Yale), and Sine Qua Non: A Journal of Creative Writing. I regularly present at 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 (CUNY).