The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer

Ridvan Askin is a Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Narrative and Becoming (2016) and the co-editor of Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (2015) and a special issue of the journal Speculations on Aesthetics in the 21st Century (2014). His publications include essays on aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, narrative theory, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He supports the German Bundesliga team SC Freiburg.

Catherine Diederich is a Teaching and Research Fellow in Linguistics and Language Didactics at the University of Teacher Education in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the development of pragmatic competence in the foreign language classroom. Her main research areas include cognitive semantics, intercultural pragmatics, and sensory language. She is the author of the book Sensory Adjectives in the Discourse of Food: A Frame-Semantic Approach to Sensory Language (2015) in which she explores the interrelation between language and sensory perception. Her interest in the senses and embodied cognition is also what fascinates her about language use in the soccer arena-apart from her passion for soccer since early childhood when she played in the American Youth Soccer Organization. In addition, she is interested in multilingualism in soccer team management, particularly from a didactic perspective.

Aline Bieri is a Research Assistant and Instructor for English Linguistics at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She holds an M.A. in English and Biology from the University of Basel and is currently working on her Ph.D. entitled Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the Swiss Context: The Linguistic Challenges and Implications of Teaching a Subject such as Biology in English. She is especially interested in the interface of biology as a subject and its linguistic requirements for students and for teachers in a CLIL and non-CLIL environment as well as how this then manifests itself in the classroom discourse in a multilingual context such as that of Switzerland. Her academic research interests cover everything from sociolinguistics to cognitive linguistics (with special emphasis on first and second language acquisition and bi- and multilingualism). Other than being a passionate linguist she is also an enthusiastic soccer aficionado and lifelong supporter of the one and only Swiss soccer club FC Basel.