Abdoulaye Kane

Abdoulaye Kane is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. He is jointly appointed to the Department of Anthropology and the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. His teaching and research interests are on transnational migration, African diaspora, transnational religious networks, remittances, return migration, and migrants’ WhatsApp groups. His research focuses on the Haalpulaar migrants’ communities in African countries, France and North America and their connections to hometowns in the Senegal River Valley. He investigates particularly the role of Migrants’ Social Networks (both community-based and religious) in the lives of migrants and their sending communities. He has published extensively in French and English on the impact of Migrants’ Hometown Association in providing social services (health, Education, Clean water, Electricity) to the villages and small towns of the Senegal River Valley. He is the co-editor of two books on African migration. 1- African Migration: Patterns and Perspective and 2- Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa with Indiana University Press. He is the editor of the section On the Move: Urbanization, Migration, and Transnationalism in The Handbook of the Sahel, Oxford University Press (2121). He is working two book manuscripts. The First titled Keeping Home in Mind analyses the practices of remittances and return among the Haalpulaar migrants in France and the United States. The second title Transnational Religious Circuits focuses on travel and religious pilgrimage in the transnational lives of leaders and disciples of the Tijani Islamic Sufi order in Senegal. His new project explores the use of WhatsApp groups among Senegalese migrants to enhance their connections with their home communities through new forms of collaborative interventions to solve social and economic problems.