Adam Beissel (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Otago, New Zealand) is a Lecturer within the Physical Cultural Studies in the Department of Kinesiology. Broadly speaking, his research advances the critical and theoretical study of physical culture by interrogating the cultural and political economies of sport and the active body. He is currently working toward completing his Ph.D. thesis: Sons of Samoa - Football, Postcolonial Subjectivity, and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberal Athletic Labor Markets.

Adam teaches the following courses:

1. •KNES 287 Sport in American Society (3 credits)
   

2. •KNES 497 Independent Studies Seminar (3 credits)
   

His research manuscripts have been featured in Sport and Society Journal (SSJ), Sport Management Review (SMR), Sport and Society (Routledge), and International Journal of Sport Marketing & Sponsorship (JMS), and he is also the co-author of published book chapters in Sport, Spectacle, and NASCAR Nation: Consumption and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism (with Newman & Giardina, Palgrave, 2011). Adam has served a speaker at North American Society for Sociology of Sport (NASSS), International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA), North American Society of Sport Management (NASSM), and several academic institutions (Towson University, University of Otago, and University of Maryland – College Park).

Adam’s thesis, Sons of Samoa, investigates the ‘sporting phenomenon’ of Samoan football players, and their overrepresentation in the National Football League (NFL). Based on firsthand ethnographic research from the US territory of American Samoa, he critically analyzes the relationship between historical conditions, cultural pluralities, and socio-economic contexts within which these athletes play the game, and the postcolonial power structures, discourses, and processes framing neoliberal athletic labor markets.