Benjamin H. Nam is currently working on his Ph.D. degree in he Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is majoring in Higher Education Administration, and pursuing specializations in Cultural Studies in Education and Sport Studies. He is interested in interdiciplinary research within education and sport studies in socio-cultural context (e.g., social justice and student development). He is also interested in such sociological theories (e.g., globalization, capital, hegemony) to his research.
Benjamin has been teaching an undergraduate course titled 'survey of international education' which covers a variety of aspects of world education in both secondary and higher education levels. Specifically, this course discusses world trends, flows and issues in international educational institutions and organizations.
Benjamin has been a liaison for an international partnership program between a South Korean governmental sports organization and a U.S higer education institution for approximately 3 and a half years. Specifically, he works closely with former Korean Olympians, elite and professional level athletes who are in their career transitions to become global sports leaders. As a means of creating global human, social, and cultural cpital (e.g., linguistic, cross-cultural, academic and educational competencies as well as professional knowledge improvement) for the former South Korean athletes, he has been closely interacting with them as an advisor and facilitator by mentoring.
Also he is interested in developing international partnership programs as well as contributing to opening communications between international academic institutions.


A Critical Discourse of Biracial Athletes in the Korean Basketball League
Professional sports leagues in South Koreas took a globalization process, recruiting foreign athletes to promote sports spectatorship and capitalist enterprise. One of the prominent examples is the Korean Basketball League in which the KBL teams recruited American athletes since the late 1990s. These athletes’ race is represented mostly as African American. More recently, the KBL teams have recruited biracial athletes from oversees who are Korean heritages through special naturalization policy officially implemented since 2009. However, scholars have paid scant attention to this social and cultural phenomenon in South Korea. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore intersectionality between biracial athletes and mainstream South Korean athletic society and determine factors if there were any discriminations and sports stereotypes toward the biracial athletes. This study attempts to increase a better and in-depth understanding of racial identity among biracial athletes in a specific regional context––East Asia. To this end, this study adopted a critical discourse analysis approach, specifically grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) since biracial athletes’ identities are examined.

Session: Sport Services: Volunteers, Employees, & Development
Fostering knowledge economy and human capital through vocational development of retired athletes in South Korea
This study used the concepts of knowledge economy and human capital to examine core vocational development programs for retired elite athletes in South Korea. Known as the ‘Global Sports Talent Development Project,’ the Ministry of Culture, Sport, and Tourism (MCST) established the Korea Foundation for the Next Generation Sports Talent (NEST) in 2007 and restructured this organization as the Centre for the Next Generation Sports Talent Development into the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation (KSPO) in 2016. The NEST/KSPO Foundation has developed diverse vocational training policies and practices for retired athletes for over the past 10 years. However, core vocational training programs and their outcomes have not been examined comprehensively. Therefore, this study adopted a descriptive case study design to investigate four of the core vocational development programs as units of analysis including: (a) Sports Talent English Program, (b) Global Professionals in Sports Program, (c) Global Sports Leadership Program, and (d) Advanced Sports Talent Development Program. These units of analysis were described by underpinning the concepts of knowledge economy and human capital, indicating the ways in which the South Korean government has made endeavors to produce global human capital through retired athletes and has expected them to reinforce sports diplomacy.