Chapter 4 presents the results of a study by Palaganas, involving participants in an online continuing education course that used an emoji-capable, text-based platform, offered through the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston, Massachusetts. The chapter outlines the study, the compiled data, and the relevant findings. The study yields further insights into the potential for using the emoji code as an effective literacy and communication tool in a higher education context – namely, in a healthcare professional education program. Further, there is discussion of an interview with Dr. Shuhan He, a prominent proponent of emoji use in healthcare situations, wherein he goes over the impetus for his creation of the heart emoji.

How does the horse help us rethink the empire developing in the Iberian world? Horse riding and horse breeding comprised important elements of Spanish governance in Iberia and underwent a dynamic process of transfer, adaptation, and change in the Americas. The framework of ferality illustrates the limits of domestication in diverse colonial environments, where the horse was not only an extension of empire but also a challenge to it. Recovering the full spectrum of human-equine relations confirms the horse’s relevance to this period of change.

Returning to the Iberian Peninsula, this chapter considers how colonial experiences influenced early modern views of horse breeding. King Philip II’s survey of horse breeding in Spain and his efforts to develop a new royal “race” (raza) of horses provide two valuable case studies of contemporary debates about improving horse breeds. Knowledge and expertise gained from active horse breeding often contradicted ideal values of lineage or blood purity. These cases acknowledge limits to the control implied in selectively breeding domesticated animals and demonstrate an early modern understanding of the contructedness of horse breeds. In a larger sense, these findings offer a nuanced reading of how raza and casta in animal husbandry relate to histories of racial terminology and classifications of difference in the Spanish empire.

The goal of Chapter 5 is to examine emoji use across the healthcare landscape, as well as what implications related to emoji theories can be gleaned from such usage and how emoji use can be applied to training healthcare professionals more generally. Prominently discussed in the chapter are clinical studies that indicate emoji writing (between practitioners and patients) may actually enhance medical outcomes. Also highlighted is the empirically attested fact that emoji scales and models may be good gauges for assessing well-being. The overall conclusion that can be drawn from the studies is that emoji might affect patients positively. Emoji are not medical cures in themselves, needless to say; they are simple pictures that affect patients positively, much like humor. They may also counteract the so-called nocebo effect, defined as a detrimental effect on health produced by psychological or psychosomatic factors such as negative expectations of treatment or prognosis.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

Chapter 7 distills from the empirical studies their implications for emoji theories overall and for their applicability to the educational and healthcare realms. The studies have borne a number of concrete implications for emoji theory in general, including how they fit in with communication theories, including nonverbal aspects. Several theoretical notions are developed as well, generalizing them from previous chapters, including the apparent function of emoji as “annotators” of meaning, not just conveyors of prosodic or gestural features in writing. Another notion is that of episodic meaning, whereby the placement of an emoji in the episodes that constitute a message adds to it semiotically. Emoji grammar is thus more appropriately characterized as an episodic grammar.

As the Spanish empire expanded, the growing abundance of horses elevated an underlying tension between two colonial goals: to populate land with horses bred in new settlements, and to control land in new settlements by regulating the movement, reproduction, and possession of horses in them. The horse population increased due to both evolutionary environmental affinities and the use of traditional husbandry methods, such as loose herd management and protection of the commons, which had some unintended consequences. The responses of Spanish and Indigenous actors to these changes presented opportunities to negotiate the perception of and exercise of Spanish imperial power in a new equine political ecology.

Although Spanish colonizers expected horses to enforce social order, new environments for breeding and keeping horses and colonial interdependence on Indigenous populations also subverted these expectations. Licenses to ride horses offers a widespread example of this new political ecology. Across New Spain and Peru, Indigenous allies gained access to horses according to Spanish customs that rewarded military service to the crown, cases that emphasize the powerful imprint of the horse in Spanish governance. More broadly, the development of Indigenous equestrianisms both within and outside of Spanish spheres of influence demonstrate the complex boundary work involved in navigating a new interspecies landscape and producing new forms of knowledge.

Using both the Petcoff and Palaganas studies as a point of departure, this chapter looks at the more general educational implications of bringing emoji into pedagogical practices. The underlying premise is that emoji not only are highly understandable images, aiding learning but also can create a positive environment, making teaching and interaction congenial and open to all learners, no matter their backgrounds or learning capacities, since emoji give them an equal voice. Emoji allow for a destigmatized approach, especially for disadvantaged learners who might not be able to adequately speak for themselves. Emoji are a psychological conduit that can easily open up lines of interaction to virtually everyone. Once this is achieved, any subject matter, from English to mathematics, can be imparted broadly through any type of learning style.

Chapter 2 summarizes the findings of a research project conducted by Petcoff in which she explores using emoji as a viable literacy and postsecondary writing teaching tool. Her work chronicles the teaching situation in a Texas community college, whereby an integrated reading and writing project was devised in which students attempted to demonstrate mastery of State-mandated literacy content areas using both traditional writing and the emoji code. The project provides data-driven findings that allow for the exploration of semioliteracy as a teaching approach, as well how the shared meanings of emoji by students constitute an unconscious semiotic domain. The Petcoff study offers opportunities for further research with similar groups of learning, via iconographic tracking and rendered ecologies with a particular focus on advancing literacy within the framework of first-year and postsecondary writing instructional efforts. Parallels between semioliterate qualities used in reading and writing instruction and healthcare, as well as healthcare professional education, are discussed at the conclusion of the chapter.