This chapter provides seventeen recommendations intended to improve PeaceComm practice worldwide.

The first six recommendations suggest continuing the Sesame Workshop design. The remainder provide a design template for Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street and other future cross-comparative PeaceComm interventions around the globe. Where relevant, these range from weaving in structural inequality realities and relative narrative approaches to conflict contexts, varying intervention designs by world system categorical target populations, treating children as active human beings when they are the target of interventions and only targeting them if indeed treating them more like adults, developing direct and ongoing relations with communication and peace and conflict scholars, structuring interpersonal communication, treating communication as a process not only product, continuing the use of the embedded factor of production effects model, conceptualizing communication also as a mediating artifact, and cultivating the bicultural “target” of an intervention to be peace-maker mediators-in-the-making. In the case of these conflicts, that means incorporating peacebuilding into child development approaches for Arab/Palestinian Israeli children out of an aim to empower their active future mediation roles

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social dimensions of language use. This chapter discusses directions in the rapidly growing field of sociopragmatics. It begins by first introducing the rationale for producing the first handbook of sociopragmatics, before briefly discussing the different, albeit complementary, ways in which the scope of sociopragmatics has been framed in the field. In the course of this discussion we draw particular attention to three key anchors of sociopragmatic research: social, interactional and normative dimensions of language use. We then offer an overview of the contents of the handbook, explaining how we have brought together a range of different research areas, topics and approaches under the umbrella of sociopragmatics. We conclude with thoughts on the place of sociopragmatics with respect to the broader field of pragmatics.

Since the 2010s, a number of scholars have explicitly worked with the term ‘interpersonal pragmatics’ in order to zoom in on the relational and interpersonal side of communication. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate how the research interest on the interpersonal and relational is inspired by (im)politeness, identity construction and communication studies in order to tackle questions about pragmatic variation and interpersonal effects. Interpersonal pragmatics does not propagate a particular methodology nor only one theory but is conceptualized as a perspective on the interpersonal side of language and communication. The chapter draws on and points to a number of earlier chapters dealing with key concepts for this field, such as (im)politeness, relational work, face, identity construction, roles and the social and historical embeddedness of communication. Key themes within interpersonal pragmatics are, among others, negotiations of agreement and disagreement, negotiations of (clashes of) norms and understandings of self and other in particular social contexts.

Sociologist Georg Simmel (1950) argued that human relationships are “inseparable from the immediacy of interaction.” That is, regardless of much one may cogitate about them, relationships happen between persons, forming, thriving, surviving, and dying as those persons communicate with one another. A relationship is a dynamic, on-going process of relating. Relationships and relating are thus key sociopragmatic phenomena. This chapter characterizes current conceptualizations of, and research on, relationships and relating in the sociopragmatic literature, but does so in view of a wide range of metaphors for and sociopsychological theories of relationships, and against the backdrop of the broader research literature on relating in interpersonal communication. Many of these metaphors, theories, and studies treat relationships as relatively static phenomena, existing apart from interaction, perhaps as a mental template for behavior, as a mini-culture of norms and patterns of action, or as rooted in individual identity. The chapter poses an alternative conceptualization of relating as endogenous to and as emerging in the dynamics of everyday interacting with one another.

This chapter introduces the idea that relationships are a fundamental component of human nature, but there is a limit on the number of relationship partners humans can have and maintain. This chapter introduces the idea of the core network (or the two to five most important people in your life), the first fifteen (i.e., the primary members of your personal network), and two outer layers of relationship closeness. This chapter explains why social interactions are a valuable unit of analysis for studying relationships, and why both personal relationships and social interactions are important contexts for the study of mobile and social media. This chapter introduces a relationship-centered approach to understanding media and presents assumptions about why relationships are important and how media is in the service of those relationships.

This chapter reviews scholarship on communication and relational maintenance and introduces a new conceptualization of relational maintenance: maintenance as growth. Communication plays a unique role in the maintenance of relationships, as it serves both as a maintenance mechanism and as the means through which other maintenance mechanisms are made manifest. In order to limit the scope, the focus is upon romantic relationships. A synopsis of the history of the study of communication and relational maintenance is offered by reviewing typologies, motivations, antecedents, and the complex connections among maintenance behaviors and relational features. The four most often invoked definitions of maintenance are reviewed, and a fifth new definition of maintenance is proposed in order to extend our conceptualizations of relational maintenance. This fifth, heretofore unarticulated (at least explicitly), is one wherein maintenance is seen as the process of keeping a relationship growing. Maintenance is defined as the state and process of growth or continuous positive change. How we communicate maintenance in accordance with definitions of relational maintenance is considered. Areas for further research are put forward, including attention to maintenance as a multiplex of behaviors as well as the valence, context, timing, and perceived intent of maintenance behaviors.