The metacommunity framework has contributed significantly to our knowledge of population, community, and ecosystems ecology by incorporating regional dispersal dynamics into explanations for local community patterns. To date, however, the metacommunity concept has been evaluated in a purely ecological context and has neglected the potential contributions from evolutionary dynamics. Nevertheless, close parallels and obvious interrelations exist between ecological and evolutionary dynamics at multiple spatial scales. In this symposium, we would bring together emerging research that evaluates how jointly operating ecological and evolutionary mechanisms determine community and metacommunity dynamics. This synthesis is needed because dispersing individuals not only alter local ecological properties such as species abundances and community composition, but also evolutionary trajectories, by simultaneously providing new genetic material and altering existing selective regimes. As a result, immigration and gene flow often have emergent, non-additive effects on community structure through complex interactions between demography and evolution. Theoretical and empirical research is now available that sheds light on interactions between ecological and evolutionary mechanisms in a metacommunity. We aim to highlight this emerging research in an integrated manner in our symposium. We will first introduce the overall framework for understanding the evolutionary ecology of metacommunities, its assumptions, and its potential for enhanced understanding in ecology. Next, we will showcase novel theoretical work on how evolutionary dynamics can strongly influence the dynamics of community assembly and the resultant structure of communities. Topics addressed in this theoretical segment would include new theory on evolutionary dynamics in patch-dynamics metacommunity models, the evolution of specialization in networks of mutualistic interactions, the interaction between priority effects and evolution in community assembly, the evolution of neutral and niche-based species interactions, and the relative roles of species sorting and evolution in determining the effects of climate change on species diversity. In the second part of the symposium, we would focus on emerging empirical evidence for how evolution shapes metacommunity properties, including how evolutionary feedbacks shape community dynamics in experimental zooplankton communities, how multi-level selection operates in metacommunities, the roles of evolution and gene flow in promoting coexistence in microcosms, and how phylogenetic information can be integrated into studies of metacommunity processes. We would end with an open discussion of the future research needs of developing a more complete understanding of the evolutionary ecology of metacommunities.