Books
Violent Impacts: How Power and Inequality Shape the Concussion Crisis (2025)
This book, co-authored with Dr. Kate Henne (The Australian National University) is now out with University of California Press. It is the culmination of over a decade of research into the sociocultural, political, and economic dimensions of the concussion crisis as they have materialized in Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Our main goal for the book was to enhance our understanding of the concussion crisis in two important ways:
1) By broadening the boundaries of the concussion crisis beyond men’s collision sports to more fully include women, trans, and non-binary people; military service members; victim-survivors of domestic and family violence; victims of state violence via military imperialism, law enforcement, and the prison-industrial complex.
2) By moving past conceptions of brain injury as a purely medical issue and considering how brain injury is a social problem. We demonstrate how power imbalances and social inequalities shape how and why brain injuries happen, and who are most likely to experience them. We are especially focused on forces of structural violence: how social structures and the workings of societal systems make certain groups of people more likely to experience harm. The book dives deep into how experiences of brain injury are shaped by gender inequity, systemic racism, poverty, colonialism, ableism, and the maintenance of power imbalances through science, medical infrastructures, policing, military operations, and sports governance.
We show how applying such sociological insights can reveal the root causes of the concussion crisis and inform social change to address a broad spectrum of harms to vulnerable and marginalized people.
A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
You can order a hard cover of paperback copy of the book on the University of California Press website (use discount code UCPSAVE30 to save 30%). You might also want to order the book through your favourite local bookstore, like Someday Books in my hometown of St. Catharines, ON.
Reviews of Violent Impacts
"While concussions in professional sports garner headlines, brain injuries remain overlooked across many other realms of life. From the military to intimate partner violence, Henne and Ventresca offer an original, incisive, and much-needed analysis of the forces that shape how we talk—or fail to talk—about concussions and the people they affect."
"Kathryn Henne and Matt Ventresca have made a very important contribution to our understanding of what is increasingly recognized as the crisis of concussion. It's not only in sport: this well-argued, well-researched book broadens the field to include marginalized groups all too often left out of the conversation. Scholarly yet accessibly written, this is essential reading for anyone interested in structural violence and the social determinants of health."
"Violent Impacts is a fascinating and timely study of an under-theorized phenomenon. Through careful, intersectional, and accessible analysis, the authors show how traumatic brain injury is an assemblage of social, cultural, economic and biological mattering, one that cannot be understood without attention to power relations. Violent Impacts deftly addresses the role of racial and gender inequalities in our understanding of brain injuries. Perhaps most importantly, the book draws needed attention to the powerful economic interests putting bodies and brains in harm’s way, as well as shaping our collective sense of the nature and acceptability of brain risks."
Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions (2020)
I co-edited this book with Dr. Mary McDonald (Georgia Tech) and it was the first published collection of sociological research about concussion. The 10 chapters were written by some of the leading brain injury scholars from humanities and social sciences disciplines. The chapters came out of a workshop we held in Atlanta in the spring of 2018 and cover topics ranging from medicalization, football equipment, gender politics in concussion science, multi-layered experiences of trauma, youth concussion recovery, the politics of suicide, and methodological principles in qualitative concussion research.
I co-wrote three chapters within this collection:
The Introduction: “Forces of Impact: Critically Examining Sports’ Concussion Crises” with Mary McDonald
Chapter 6: “I Kinda’ Lost My Sense of Who I Was”: Foregrounding Youths’ Experiences in Critical Conversations about Sport-Related Concussions” with William Bridel, Danika Kelly, Kevin Vilunius and Kathryn Schneider
Chapter 10: “Beyond the Biopsychosocial: A Case for Critical Qualitative Concussion Research”