James Kennon Rice · University of Essex
I study how misinformation shapes climate politics, economic decisions, and our collective future.
Political science × Sustainable transitions
Colchester, United Kingdom
2026 · Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence
This article argues that contemporary capitalism has entered a phase in which outcomes are increasingly shaped by the privatization and strategic destabilization of the epistemic commons through frontier artificial intelligence and platform-mediated misinformation.
Read more2026 · Review of Evolutionary Political Economy
This essay develops a complexity-oriented research program for classical liberal thought, showing how rule-of-law institutions can enable cooperation amid political, economic, and environmental pressures from climate change.
Read more2026 · PLOS Climate
Climate misinformation represents one of the most significant barriers to effective climate action in the 21st century. Building upon Yotam Ophir’s framework, this essay examines how climate misinformation is evolving and projects its future trajectory.
Read moreAll publications & working papers →
The researcher
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at The University of Essex on the Leverhulme Sustainable Transitions Doctoral Training Programme.
My research interests include quantitative social science, political economy and misinformation, and environmental governance. My PhD research project, primarily supervised by Dr. Zorzeta Bakaki in the Department of Government, is on the political, social, and economic effects of climate change misinformation.
While my primary discipline is political science, the Essex Sustainable Transitions programme is interdisciplinary in scope, and I have a secondary supervisor, Professor Thankom Arun, in the Essex Business School.
I am a Research Affiliate of the Hayek Programme in Liberal Political Economy at the London School of Economics, a Research Fellow at the Earth System Governance Project, and a Mercatus Fellow in Applied Mainline Political Economy at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I held a Ronald Coase Fellowship from August 2025 to August 2026 and was a Research Associate in Online Moral Contagion with the Oxford Computational Political Science Group at the Oxford Internet Institute from March 2025 to March 2026. My Policy Fellowship at the Council for Countering Online Disinformation runs from April to September 2026.
I am a Teaching Assistant in the UCL Department of Political Science. From October 2026, I will be a Fixed-Term Lecturer in Computational Social Science in the University of Essex Department of Sociology and Criminology, teaching Introduction to Social Data Science (SC207).
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