Menan Jangu

Menan Jangu, a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment, has been selected as one of nine recipients to receive a 2009 Outstanding Student Instructor Award.

Jangu and other U-M recipients will be recognized at an April 17 awards ceremony starting at 4 p.m. in the Rackham Amphitheatre; a public reception follows.í‚   Students were selected based on exceptional ability and creativity as teachers; continuous growth as teachers; service as outstanding mentors and advisers to their students and colleagues; and growth as scholars in the course of their graduate programs.

Each year up to 20 awards of $1,000 are made.

"I view teaching as a mentorship ranging from mediating material for particular students with challenges of one kind or another, to strengthening student written and spoken expression, to motivating and assisting students in establishment of professional networks," Jangu said. "I embrace mentorship role by engaging students to a discussion about, í¢â‚¬Ëœwhat next' after school, and remind them that their future professional careers are already being shaped by their choices, dedication to particular issues, talents and social networks."

In 2008-09, Jangu taught three courses:

• Environ 110: Global Environmental Change I. He supervised laboratory and discussion sessions for undergraduate students enrolled in Global Change I course. Sessions employed STELLA systems modeling software to investigate the dynamics of natural systems (physical, chemical, and biological).
• Environ 111: Global Environmental Change II. He supervised laboratory and discussion sessions for students enrolled in Global Change II course.í‚   He í‚  also guide students on the use of Geographical Information Systems tools, conduct spatial analysis about the natural world and the role of human activities in shaping and changing the environment. (The Global Change Curriculum is part of the undergraduate Program in the Environment and its courses are aimed mostly at first- and second-year students.)
• CAAS 458: Environmental Justice in Contemporary Africa. The course was designed to convey an in-depth understanding of the disproportionate burden experienced by people in Africa due to colonization, globalization, and extractive industries. í‚  Several themes ran through the course, and connected it with Global Change: cultural transformation, migrations, resource conflicts, human health, environmental conditions, and grassroots movements.

In addition to teaching and SNRE studies, he also is enrolled in a graduate certificate program through U-M's Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.

Jangu's SNRE research is titled, "Environmental Aspects of Changing Traditional Medicine in Mwanza, Tanzania: Healers' Perspectives and Practices," examines changing traditional healing practices in relation to medical and environmental changes as well as environmental governance in Tanzania. The health and environmental changes in which he is interested result from environmental governance, the establishment of extractive industries and changes in climatic conditions. He is studying how environmental conditions impact people's health, healers' spatial arrangement, as well as their access to medically-important flora and fauna.

The proposed research is carried out in Mwanza, an economic frontier region forming a transport corridor in east and central Africa near Lake Victoria. Mwanza's history as an economic and political frontier region has made for intense and increasing demand for biomedical, botanical and other natural medicines.í‚   He examines healers' responses to these new healthcare demands, chronicling transformations in traditional medicine markets, products and practices.

The study demonstrates healers' vulnerabilities to environmental change, environmental governance and new markets, as well as their entrepreneurship in creating new commodities and client relationships in the face of change, Jangu said. In his work, he describes healers as adapting to environmental change by:

• Developing networks of medical knowledge and practice in response to socioeconomic and ecological changes;
• Expressing concern over environmental degradation, as their ritual spaces and plant/animal healing products are increasingly subject to conservation measures and biomedical prospecting; and
• Enacting conflict and competition among themselves in response to socio-environmental change, both through ritual and through the remedies they are developing.