Matt Ventresca

Dr. Matt Ventresca is a critical sport and health researcher whose work is situated across sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and science and technology studies. He works at the intersections of qualitative research, public knowledge mobilization, digital scholarship, and creative methods. His research at Georgia Tech has involved two main projects: 1) the COVID Sports Project, an online hub of digital resources and analysis exploring the intersections between sports and the COVID-19 pandemic; and 2) Sound, Sport, and the Digital, an event series and network of scholars/artists exploring the social and political dimensions of sports soundscapes. Dr. Ventresca is also a Research Associate at Western University (School of Kinesiology) and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University (School of Regulation and Global Governance). 

Dr. Ventresca has also spent the past decade researching sociocultural inequities within sport’s “concussion crisis." This work has entailed examinations of: media/scientific discourses around Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE); conceptions of scientific uncertainty and the politics of ignorance; media narratives linking brain injury to racialized constructions of deviance and crime; athlete experiences of concussion recovery in elite and youth sports contexts; theoretical approaches to qualitative research on concussion; and racial bias within concussion science. Matt's latest book Violent Impacts: How Power and Inequality Shape the Concussion Crisis (2025), co-authored with Dr. Kathryn Henne (Australian National University), explores how structural violence influences experiences and understandings of brain injury across different social contexts. He also co-edited Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions (2020) with Dr. Mary McDonald (Georgia Tech) which was the first interdisciplinary collection of critical research on the topic.

Matt has also conducted research into the power dynamics and inequalities shaping the opioid crisis and how these materialize through the use of painkillers in elite sports.

His work increasingly involves projects grounded in media studies, digital scholarship, and knowledge mobilization. He helps lead new research investigating sociological trends in Canadian sports media, including the experiences of racialized workers within the industry. Through the COVID Sports Project and Sound, Sport, and the Digital, Dr. Ventresca has expolred the potentials of creative forms of knowledge mobilization, including podcasting, interactive webinars, and website design.