Allissa V Richardson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4900610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Allissa V Richardson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Allissa V |
| FAMILY NAME | Richardson |
| SIGNATURE | RICHARDSON A V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3165-9401 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Conquering the Covid-19 Infodemic: How the Digital Black Press Battled Racialized Misinformation in 2020
In 2020, as many Black people around the world fought both anti-Black racism and COVID-19, the Black press in the US was dealing with another widespread problem: an infodemic. Editors of Black digital publications were on the frontlines of dispelling racialized misinformation about COVID-19, all while reporting on a contentious presidential election, ongoing protests for racial justice, and a rising COVID-19 death toll that disproportionately aff…
Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings
George Floyd’s fatal police encounter sparked the largest social justice movement in American history. Black press journalists in the United States found themselves documenting and coping with Black trauma as they performed their duties in pandemic-mandated isolation. Through semi-structured interviews with digital Black press journalists, this study, which was conducted between 2020 and 2021, explores the reporting and personal strategies these …
The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Updated Edition
This book considers how media coverage of unexpected, dramatic events shapes public consciousness about important social and political problems. It argues that when incidents of police brutality become news, they offer one of the few real battlegrounds available for marginalized voices and activists to find a public platform and take on the powerful. Including new chapters that look more closely at race and racial justice in incidents of police f…
Black bodies at risk: Exploring the corporeal iconography of the anti-police brutality movement
Black bodies at risk are in constant conversation with each other. The Black witness who films a fatal police encounter on her phone is talking to the Black victim, promising not to leave him in his final moments. The distant Black witness who sees that video then talks back to the witness and the victim, creating powerful imagery that amplifies the tragic footage. In this manner, those working under the broad banner of the Black Lives Matter mov…
The Coming Archival Crisis: How Ephemeral Video Disappears Protest Journalism and Threatens Newsreels of Tomorrow
Today’s Black Lives Matter movement is mediated largely by fortuitous smartphone witnesses and dedicated mobile journalists, who post precious footage to social media platforms that are designed to disappear their content. This has potential long-term consequences for the world’s collective memory of this summer’s global uprising, in the wake of George Floyd’s extrajudicial killing—and beyond. For these reasons, I argue in this article that the n…
Endless mode: Exploring the procedural rhetoric of a Black Lives Matter-themed newsgame
A week after the back-to-back police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in early July 2016, a game developer, who goes by the screen name Yvvy, sat in front of her console mulling over the headlines. She designed a newsgame that featured civilian–police interactions that were plucked from that reportage. She entitled it Easy Level Life. The newsgame is fashioned in what developers call ‘endless mode’, where players are challenged to…
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book rev…
Dismantling Respectability: The Rise of New Womanist Communication Models in the Era of Black Lives Matter
Legacy media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement often highlighted charismatic male leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while scores of Black women worked quietly in the background. Today’s leaders of the modern Black Lives Matter movement have turned this paradigm on its face. This case study explores the revamped communication styles of four Black feminist organizers who led the early Black Lives Matter Movement of 2014: Brittany Fe…
The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation, by Sharon Willis
The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television News, by Libby Lewis
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism
Modern black citizen journalists have embraced the mobile phone as their storytelling tool of choice to produce raw reportage that challenges long-standing narratives of race, power and privilege in America. This dissertation investigates specifically how leading anti-police brutality activists—especially those affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Movement—leverage the affordances of mobile and social media to report original news within the co…
Bearing Witness While Black: Theorizing African American mobile journalism after Ferguson
Modern black citizen journalists have embraced the mobile phone as their storytelling tool of choice to produce paradigm-shifting displays of raw reportage that challenge long-standing narratives of race, power, and privilege in America. From the cellphone footage of fiery Ferguson, metaphorically ablaze with racial tension and literally erupting into nightly conflagrations of riotous frustration in August 2014; to the final images of a broken-le…
The Platform: How Pullman porters used railways to engage in networked journalism
This article re-frames the early twentieth-century news partnerships of African-American Pullman porters and the black press as an example of networked journalism that functioned efficiently for decades, well before the Information Age. Networked journalism refers to a twenty-first-century style of reportage that leverages the efforts of many people to tell a story, from local amateurs acting as citizen journalists to professional journalists wor…
Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings
George Floyd’s fatal police encounter sparked the largest social justice movement in American history. Black press journalists in the United States found themselves documenting and coping with Black trauma as they performed their duties in pandemic-mandated isolation. Through semi-structured interviews with digital Black press journalists, this study, which was conducted between 2020 and 2021, explores the reporting and personal strategies these …
The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Updated Edition
This book considers how media coverage of unexpected, dramatic events shapes public consciousness about important social and political problems. It argues that when incidents of police brutality become news, they offer one of the few real battlegrounds available for marginalized voices and activists to find a public platform and take on the powerful. Including new chapters that look more closely at race and racial justice in incidents of police f…
Black bodies at risk: Exploring the corporeal iconography of the anti-police brutality movement
Black bodies at risk are in constant conversation with each other. The Black witness who films a fatal police encounter on her phone is talking to the Black victim, promising not to leave him in his final moments. The distant Black witness who sees that video then talks back to the witness and the victim, creating powerful imagery that amplifies the tragic footage. In this manner, those working under the broad banner of the Black Lives Matter mov…
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism
Modern black citizen journalists have embraced the mobile phone as their storytelling tool of choice to produce raw reportage that challenges long-standing narratives of race, power and privilege in America. This dissertation investigates specifically how leading anti-police brutality activists—especially those affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Movement—leverage the affordances of mobile and social media to report original news within the co…
Bearing Witness While Black: Theorizing African American mobile journalism after Ferguson
Modern black citizen journalists have embraced the mobile phone as their storytelling tool of choice to produce paradigm-shifting displays of raw reportage that challenge long-standing narratives of race, power, and privilege in America. From the cellphone footage of fiery Ferguson, metaphorically ablaze with racial tension and literally erupting into nightly conflagrations of riotous frustration in August 2014; to the final images of a broken-le…
The Platform: How Pullman porters used railways to engage in networked journalism
This article re-frames the early twentieth-century news partnerships of African-American Pullman porters and the black press as an example of networked journalism that functioned efficiently for decades, well before the Information Age. Networked journalism refers to a twenty-first-century style of reportage that leverages the efforts of many people to tell a story, from local amateurs acting as citizen journalists to professional journalists wor…
The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television News, by Libby Lewis
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism
Modern black citizen journalists have embraced the mobile phone as their storytelling tool of choice to produce raw reportage that challenges long-standing narratives of race, power and privilege in America. This dissertation investigates specifically how leading anti-police brutality activists—especially those affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Movement—leverage the affordances of mobile and social media to report original news within the co…
The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation, by Sharon Willis
Dismantling Respectability: The Rise of New Womanist Communication Models in the Era of Black Lives Matter
Legacy media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement often highlighted charismatic male leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while scores of Black women worked quietly in the background. Today’s leaders of the modern Black Lives Matter movement have turned this paradigm on its face. This case study explores the revamped communication styles of four Black feminist organizers who led the early Black Lives Matter Movement of 2014: Brittany Fe…
The Coming Archival Crisis: How Ephemeral Video Disappears Protest Journalism and Threatens Newsreels of Tomorrow
Today’s Black Lives Matter movement is mediated largely by fortuitous smartphone witnesses and dedicated mobile journalists, who post precious footage to social media platforms that are designed to disappear their content. This has potential long-term consequences for the world’s collective memory of this summer’s global uprising, in the wake of George Floyd’s extrajudicial killing—and beyond. For these reasons, I argue in this article that the n…
Endless mode: Exploring the procedural rhetoric of a Black Lives Matter-themed newsgame
A week after the back-to-back police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in early July 2016, a game developer, who goes by the screen name Yvvy, sat in front of her console mulling over the headlines. She designed a newsgame that featured civilian–police interactions that were plucked from that reportage. She entitled it Easy Level Life. The newsgame is fashioned in what developers call ‘endless mode’, where players are challenged to…
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book rev…
Black bodies at risk: Exploring the corporeal iconography of the anti-police brutality movement
Black bodies at risk are in constant conversation with each other. The Black witness who films a fatal police encounter on her phone is talking to the Black victim, promising not to leave him in his final moments. The distant Black witness who sees that video then talks back to the witness and the victim, creating powerful imagery that amplifies the tragic footage. In this manner, those working under the broad banner of the Black Lives Matter mov…
The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Updated Edition
This book considers how media coverage of unexpected, dramatic events shapes public consciousness about important social and political problems. It argues that when incidents of police brutality become news, they offer one of the few real battlegrounds available for marginalized voices and activists to find a public platform and take on the powerful. Including new chapters that look more closely at race and racial justice in incidents of police f…
Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings
George Floyd’s fatal police encounter sparked the largest social justice movement in American history. Black press journalists in the United States found themselves documenting and coping with Black trauma as they performed their duties in pandemic-mandated isolation. Through semi-structured interviews with digital Black press journalists, this study, which was conducted between 2020 and 2021, explores the reporting and personal strategies these …
Conquering the Covid-19 Infodemic: How the Digital Black Press Battled Racialized Misinformation in 2020
In 2020, as many Black people around the world fought both anti-Black racism and COVID-19, the Black press in the US was dealing with another widespread problem: an infodemic. Editors of Black digital publications were on the frontlines of dispelling racialized misinformation about COVID-19, all while reporting on a contentious presidential election, ongoing protests for racial justice, and a rising COVID-19 death toll that disproportionately aff…
Political science (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Journalism (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Criminology (4 works)