Jermaine Anthony Richards is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he is a Dean's Endowed Dissertation Fellow of the USC Graduate School. Richards’ work examines institutional power and focuses on how organizations across communication, media, and cultural industries assign value and virtue to computational and simulational objects, namely games, virtual worlds, and other experimental creative forms and practices, during times of social and environmental crisis, political upheaval, and structural change.
Drawing on communication and media studies, Black studies, and critical political economy, with an STS inflection, Richards’s dissertation examines how industries and organizations institutionalize civic categories that shape which problems are deemed worthy of engagement: investment and interaction. The project rests on a relational database he engineered. The database becomes the project’s archive on which the project’s critical inquiries will be directed. Robeson Taj Frazier chairs his dissertation committee, which includes Henry Jenkins, Cristina Mejia Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm (SCA: Interactive Media and Games Division), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Duke University, Program in Literature).
Richards’ scholarship draws on nearly two decades of professional experience across marketing: creative advertising, media production, and International technology policy and development policy. He began working on Madison Avenue at age thirteen through a specialized New York City high school founded in partnership with agencies and their holding companies (Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis Groupe). He then worked in media strategy, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch for nearly a decade before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer, where he served as the credited producer of the viral browser game Hair Nah. The viral game’s success followed earlier work in virtual worlds and simulation environments. For example, in Second Life, he founded a production, curation, and publishing company and ran it as its principal for nearly a decade alongside his formative studies. Most notably, he directed a first-of-its-kind feature-length adaptation of a virtual-staged ballet of Milton’s 17th-century theological and philosophical epic Paradise Lost, which retells the biblical story of the Fall of Man from the book of Genesis. Widely reviewed, the film was characterized as “a work of remarkable skill and passion, and a showcase for what it’s possible to achieve in SL machinima. Perhaps it represents a new benchmark in the genre.”
His interest in how communication, computation, and organization could influence how humans approached ethical, political, and philosophical questions led him to act. After completing graduate study at the LSE and serving as a Summer Associate on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure at the New America DC think tank, Richards became a Fellow at New America's Digital Impact and Governance Initiative. As a Fellow, he led research and co-authored a landscape analysis of digital transformation and governance. He also led the development of the Catalog of Digital Solutions in the Lower Mekong Region, curated to fill an information gap on how digital solutions address social, economic, and sustainability challenges across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The study examined the emerging field of digital public infrastructure while addressing surveillance, censorship, and broader human rights concerns—including fundamental freedoms and internet freedom—that hinder people-centered development in the region. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded the research. He extended findings from the Mekong report in Fair Observer to discuss Jamaica's digital disaster infrastructure after Hurricane Melissa.
Richards’ book reviews and chapters appear in the International Journal of Communication and The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture (eds. Kinitra Brooks (Michigan State) and Nicholas Jones (Yale). He regularly presents at the American Studies Association, Society for Cinema Studies, and the International Communication Association’s conferences, and he is always open to discussing computation, simulation, games, and other social problems.
Richards holds 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.