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 concerns institutional power in communication, media, and cultural industries. In particular, he examines how organizations define social problems and assign value and virtue to computational and simulational objects and practices—including games, virtual worlds, and other experimental media forms—when advancing them as viable responses to problems.
Richards’ 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 he engineered, which serves as its archive and helps direct the inquiry. Robeson Taj Frazier chairs his 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).
Richards’ scholarship also draws on nearly two decades of professional experience spanning creative advertising, media production, and international technology and development policy. He 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). He 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, he was the credited producer of Hair Nah, a viral browser game about a Black woman traveling while people try to touch her hair.
His work in virtual, simulated, and synthetic environments, however, began much earlier. In Second Life, he founded a company devoted to production, curation, and publishing, which he led as its principal for nearly a decade alongside his formative studies. Most notably, he 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 widely reviewed. One critic praised its cinematography and editing, calling it “a work of remarkable skill and passion” and stating that it “established a new benchmark for Second Life machinima.”
These experiences deepened Richards’ 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), he served as a Summer Associate at New America, a Washington, DC-based think tank, where he worked on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure. He subsequently became a Fellow in the organization’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative.
As a Fellow, Richards 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. 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. Richards subsequently drew on findings from the Mekong report in Fair Observer to examine Jamaica’s digital disaster infrastructure.
Richards’ 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). He regularly presents at conferences of the American Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the International Communication Association.
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.