Jacques P. Lesure

Visiting Assistant Professor of Education, Brown University

Jacques P. Lesure is a scholar, evaluator, and consultant from DeKalb County, Georgia. His research explores how nonprofit and community-based organizations working to address racial and economic inequality through education experience, shape, and challenge prevailing norms. He is particularly interested in how knowledge within these settings is legitimized and used to define accountability, effectiveness, and impact. His dissertation examined the politics and pedagogies of a privately funded nonprofit focused on workforce development for “high-achieving Black men,” revealing tensions between dominant narratives of racial progress, a model of “exposure pedagogy,” and students’ demands for deeper engagement with gender and sexual politics. Across his work, Lesure asks how well-meaning individuals and institutions make decisions within the constraints of dominant social and political systems, and how evaluation itself might be reimagined in more liberatory and responsive ways. He holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has served as a culturally responsive and equitable evaluator with the National Science Foundation.