Species interactions are of great interest to both community ecologists and evolutionary biologists. This symposium highlights research focusing on the complex ways that the community context can alter the evolutionary process. The majority of species interaction experiments focus on pairwise interactions. However, individuals interact with many more species over their lifetime in natural communities. Alternatively, many studies measure selection in the wild, which gives a more realistic view of selection, but remains relatively agnostic to the components underlying the selection. While these approaches have clear strengths, neither focuses on explicitly understanding the way that community interactions can generate unique patterns of selection on species traits. This remains a challenge because ecological communities are highly complex systems. As such complex systems, species do not evolve in isolation, but rather are faced with diverse selection pressures from the assortment of species present in the community. This broader ecological context can have wide-ranging effects. Moving past pairwise interactions, it is possible to consider the direct effects of multiple species. Even in the absence of non-additive or indirect effects, by simply considering multiple species interactions simultaneously, the nature of selection a species experiences can be drastically altered. Species interactions also give rise to ubiquitous indirect ecological effects. These indirect effects can qualitatively alter the selection that would be expected. The indirect effects that can arise when taking more species into consideration can be extended upwards leading to more higher-order interactions and emergent selection pressures in communities. Researchers have begun bridging these approaches by explicitly investigating how the community context shapes evolution, investigating whether pairwise interactions are sufficient to explain natural evolutionary dynamics, or whether multispecies interactions result in diffuse or non-additive effects. These efforts to understand how species traits evolve in multi species communities are important steps on the path to a richer understanding of the evolutionary process in natural environments. This symposium offers a broad view of current research on evolution in a community context, with a wide range of study organisms and research approaches.