Origin
The SCRL launched in January 2025 under the direction of Dr. Jordana Garbati, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream.
The SCRL is an environment and community dedicated to research and teaching about symbolic communication. The current main focus of our research and teaching at The SCRL is emoji communication. Our activities include small-scale research projects and course development.
The SCRL is housed at the University of Toronto Mississauga in the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.
People
Director: Jordana Garbati, PhD, MBA
Jordana Garbati is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (ISUP) and Director of the Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre (RGASC) at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). She teaches courses on academic writing and intercultural communication. Most recently, she designed and offered the first undergraduate course on emoji rhetoric at the University of Toronto (ISP250: Emoji Rhetoric: A New Paradigm in Communications). Her research focuses on academic writing and emoji communication. She is the co-author of the book Mastering Academic Writing (2019, SAGE) and is the co-editor of the journal Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie.
Jordana holds a PhD in Education with a focus on Applied Linguistics from Western University, an MBA from Wilfrid Laurier University, a Master of Education from Queen’s University, and a Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts from York University.
Jordana is an emojiologist (from emojiology). 🤓 She developed University of Toronto’s first course focused solely on emoji rhetoric. She has led emoji-focused research projects with student researchers. She is a non-voting member of the Unicode Consortium and has been interviewed about emoji and language development by the CBC and UofT Magazine.
She launched The SCRL in 2025.
Student Researchers (current):
- Alya Ruken
Student Researchers (former):
- Massimo Bozzo
- Alya Ruken
- Sacha Samouk
- Lucas Zuzak