research + writing.

“Research is formalized curiosity.

It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

—zora neale hurston

Dr. Allissa V. Richardson studies how Black communities use media technologies to witness, archive, contest, and survive systems of racial power. Her research sits at the intersection of journalism studies, Black studies, digital media, civic technology, and critical geography, with a particular focus on how emerging technologies shape public memory, visibility, and community storytelling.

Her early scholarship examined how African Americans use smartphones and social media to produce their own news networks during moments of crisis, protest, and political upheaval. By analyzing Tweets, livestreams, smartphone footage, blogs, and other forms of citizen media, Dr. Richardson developed new theories about Black witnessing and mobile journalism, situating these practices within a long historical continuum of Black resistance media stretching back more than 200 years. Her award-winning book, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism (Oxford University Press, 2020), received national recognition for its contributions to journalism studies and digital media scholarship.

Today, much of Dr. Richardson’s work is conducted through the USC Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab, the first Black media studies research center on the West Coast, which she founded in 2021. Named after pioneering Black newspaper publisher and political activist Charlotta Bass, the Lab explores how immersive media, artificial intelligence, oral history, and geospatial storytelling can function as tools for ethical archival preservation, civic repair, and public memory rather than extraction or erasure.

One major initiative is the Second Draft Project, an AI-powered interactive oral history archive developed in partnership with the USC Digital Repository. The project features conversational interviews with figures such as Lora King, Ilyasah Shabazz, Philonise Floyd, and civil rights attorney Lee Merritt. Rather than generating synthetic responses, the platform uses natural language processing to surface authentic testimony from hundreds of indexed video clips, allowing users to engage historical memory in real time.

Dr. Richardson is also developing Monumental, a mobile storytelling and public memory platform that uses geolocation technology, oral history, immersive journalism, and participatory mapping to document Black cultural landmarks threatened by climate disaster, displacement, and historical erasure. Initially centered in Altadena, California after the 2025 Eaton Fire, the project explores what she calls “Black sacred cartography”: community-centered digital mapping practices that preserve Black spatial memory and transform navigation into acts of witnessing.

Across her work, Dr. Richardson asks how journalism, technology, and public memory might be reimagined in ways that center Black life, community agency, and democratic storytelling. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Dr. Richardson is an Associate Professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she holds a joint appointment in Journalism and Communication. She serves on the editorial boards of Digital Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Journalism Practice, and other leading journals in media and communication studies.

books.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

peer-reviewed journal articles.

Richardson, A.V. (2025). Researching resistance: The challenges and responsibilities of documenting race, media and justice. Journalism and Communication Monographs 27(2), 138-145. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219983251329873.

Allissa V. Richardson and Miya Williams Fayne. (2024). Conquering the COVID-19 infodemic: How the digital Black Press battled racialized misinformation in 2020. Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2338374.

Williams Fayne, Miya and Allissa V. Richardson. (2023). Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings. International Journal of Press/Politics. DOI: 10.1177/19401612231187562.

Chang, H0-Chun H., Richardson, Allissa V., and Emilio Ferrara. (2022). Justice for George Floyd: How Instagram facilitated the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. PLOS ONE.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). Black bodies at risk: Exploring the embodied protest journalism of the anti-police brutality movement. Journalism. Invited to join Special Issue: UGC and News Epistemologies of Conflict Reporting. DOI: 10.1177/14648849211064072.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). The coming archival crisis: How ephemeral video disappears protest journalism & threatens newsreels of tomorrow. Digital Journalism 8(10): 1338-1346, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2020.1841568.

Richardson, Allissa. V. (2020). The “Good News”: How the Gospel of Anti-Respectability Is Shaping Black Millennial Christian Podcasting. Fire!!!, 6(1), 67-97. Selected for Special Issue: Theorizing the Digital Black Church.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Endless mode: Exploring the procedural rhetoric of a Black Lives Matter-themed newsgame. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Selected for Special Issue: Playful approaches to news engagement.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2019). Dismantling respectability: The rise of new womanist communication models in the era of Black Lives Matter. Journal of Communication.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). Bearing witness while black: Theorizing African American mobile journalism after Ferguson. Digital Journalism 5(6): 673-698.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). The Platform: How Pullman porters used railways to engage in networked journalism after the Great War. Journalism Studies 17(4): 398-414.

commissioned reports & white papers.

Richardson, Allissa V. & Miya Williams Fayne. (2024). The digital Black Press strategically combated Covid-19 misinformation. Columbia Journalism Review. New York, NY: Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). Trends in digital citizen journalism: Bearing witness, building movements, and crafting counternarratives. Just Tech: Media & Democracy. Brooklyn, NY: Social Sciences Research Council.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). When video vanishes: How ephemeral social media platforms disappear protest journalism. Items: Insights from Social Sciences. Brooklyn, NY: Social Sciences Research Council.

peer-reviewed book chapters.

Richardson, A.V. (2026). AI and Modalities in News: Implications for Race. In Pavlik, J. (Ed.), The DeGruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Journalism. Boston, MA: DeGruyter. Forthcoming. 

Richardson, A.V. (2024). Social media, citizen reporting and journalism. In Pavlik, J. (Ed.), Milestones in Digital Journalism, pp. 71-88. New York, NY: Routledge.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2022). Foreword. In Regina Lawrence (Ed.), The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Updated Edition, xi-xiii. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2022). Witnessing George Floyd: Tracing Black mobile journalism’s rise, impact and enduring questions. In Stuart Allan (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, pp. 161-169. New York, NY: Routledge.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2019). Black Lives Matter and the rise of womanist news narratives. In Carter, Cynthia, Linda Steiner and Stuart Allan (Eds.), Journalism, Gender and Power, pp. 221-235. New York, NY: Routledge.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2018). The Movement and its mobile journalism: A phenomenology of Black Lives Matter journalist-activists, pp. 387-400. In Eldridge, Scott A. & Bob Franklin (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

docuseries.

Richardson, A.V. (2026). Expert Scholar. In Fussell, S., and Holness, J. (dir.) #WhileBlack. Feature film. Forthcoming broadcast.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2022). Expert scholar. In Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s (E.P.) Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. 2022. Limited docuseries. USA: PBS.

Glass, Alton; Davis-McGee, Adam; McCoy, Paris; and Richardson, Allissa V. Co-executive producers. In Protest: Grassroots Stories from the Frontlines. 2020-2021. Virtual reality limited docuseries. USA: Facebook Watch/Oculus TV. 

s1 | [In Protest: Minneapolis & St. Paul]: e1—First Response; e2—Art of the Movement; e3—Comfort for the Culture

s2 | [In Protest: Washington, DC]: e1—Tactical Broadcast; e2—Get in Where You Fit In; e3—Digital Justice; e4—Weaponizing the Vote

s3 | [In Protest: Los Angeles]: e1—Generational Uprising; e2—Compton Cowboys; e3—Fight for Your Freedom

s4 | [In Protest: Minneapolis & St. Paul]: e1—Kill Your Masters; e2—A Protest is Not a Riot; e3—Remembering the God in Us

book reviews.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2026). Meredith Clark’s Black Twitter and the Durability of Black Digital Life. Dialogues on Digital Society, 0(0).

Richardson, Allissa V. (2018). The Poitier effect: Racial melodrama and fantasies of reconciliation, by Sharon Willis. The Black Scholar 48(1): 78-80.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2017). The myth of post-racialism in television news, by Libby Lewis. The Black Scholar 47(3): 85-87.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina, by Cynthia Joyce. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator 71(3): 382-384.

op-eds.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2025). Firsthand footage of ICE raids is both witness and resistance. Los Angeles Times. June 18. 

Richardson, A.V. (2025). Smartphones are once again setting the agenda for justice as the Latino community documents ICE actions. June 18. The Conversation. 

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). We have enough proof. What’s the purpose of sharing violent police videos anymore, other than to traumatize Black communities? Vox.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). The meaning of Amanda Gorman: How the poet laureate’s rise illuminates a lasting heritage of Black women’s activism. Center for Health Journalism Blog. Los Angeles, CA: USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). It wasn’t a gun: A material archive of police violence. The Atlantic.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). In California, a history of young, powerful voices in journalism emerge. KCET.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). The problem with police-shooting videos. The Atlantic.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Why cellphone videos of black people’s deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs. The Conversation.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Smartphone witnessing becomes synonymous with Black patriotism after George Floyd’s death. The Conversation.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2015). Mobile journalism goes virtual. Nieman Lab: 2016 Predictions for Journalism. 

Richardson, Allissa V. (2012). Mobile journalism: A model for the future. Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

lesson plans.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). #SayHerName: A lesson plan. Teaching Media Quarterly 4 (1): 1-6.