This volume presents original research from the 4th MESEA conference, "Ethnic Communities in Democratic Societies," May 2004, Thessaloniki, Greece. The original title was replaced by the current one as the present volume took shape. The new title, "Transcultural Localisms," focuses on the common thread running through the sixteen essays of the volume: in the twenty-first century, flows of culture, capital and labor cannot curb the resurgence of local resistances that contest global dynamics. Today's global culture cannot integrate everything; rather, its terrain is open to challenge and its borders are constantly in flux. If anything, local resistances appropriate elements they find useful from that same global culture which they are forced to accept. As a result, their own projects of cultural, economic and political survival are expedited. The essays collected in this volume emphasize the potential of the local to challenge rather than submit, and to defy those discourses which protect the interests of institutional control, thereby creating possibilities for alternative discourses.
