James Mangan passed away in August 2008
His obituary can be found Here.

Before coming to CIE James worked in multiple capacities in Asia. He spent a year with the International Voluntary Services working with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.  He then went to Vietnam where he worked restoring and planting rice paddies during the Vietnam War. In 1968, he worked in Taiwan for two years, teaching English as a second language.

While at CIE his research focused on the cultural and cognitive factors influencing the ability of rural farmers in Asia to understand the pictures and visual communications often used as part of rural development work. While still a student, he spent a year working on a UNESCO project in Maluku and Irian Jaya, Indonesia.

Because of his knowledge of Indonesia and his contacts in the Ministry of Education, he played an instrumental role in helping CIE win a large-scale NFE project in Indonesia, financed by the World Bank. The PENMAS (Direktorat Pendidikan Masyarakat or Directorate of Community Education) project, as it was known, had a mandate to create the infrastructure to provide nonformal education to rural areas throughout Indonesia.  James spent several years working in Indonesia for the project as the Technical Assistant for curriculum development. 

Among his many other assignments in Asia, from 1988 to 1990 James was the Senior Advisor for Communication with the Technology Transfer in Agriculture Project (CTTA) project, funded by USAID and managed by AED.  He worked in East Java where he was responsible for developing cost-effective communications for transferring agricultural technologies to farmers.  He designed research to test the communication effectiveness of photonovels, calendars, and posters – using the insights gained from his dissertation research.

He subsequently worked for many years on a number of other rural development projects in countries in Asia, although living and working primarily in Indonesia. His expertise focused on the domains of nonformal education, technical training, regional planning and management, land use planning, and integrated pest management.

In 2006, RTI employed James to work in Banda Aceh, Indonesia as a Provincial Coordinator for the Decentralized Basic Education 1 (DBE1) project – a relief activity for survivors of the historic tsunami of 2004. [3-24]