Born into a family of teachers, Tracy Corley fought the idea of ever becoming one herself. Instead, she pursued her passions for design and sustainable development in architecture school at Clemson University in South Carolina. After graduating, she applied her design thinking skills to advertising and technology companies before returning to architecture.
While working for an architecture firm in Seattle, Corley was approached by a developer to help prepare materials for upcoming litigation. This opportunity gave her a glimpse into policy enforcement and failures, and led to a desire to do more of that kind of work, so she started multiple businesses. As an entrepreneur and volunteer board member with organizations such as the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, she advised government leaders and agencies on policies, including the governor of Washington, the mayor of Seattle, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of Labor. These experiences helped her influence many policy areas, including energy, clean technology, finance, higher education, and trade. Her consulting practice also introduced her to community-engaged action research and participatory approaches. After 20 years as a policy influencer and practitioner, she recognized sizable gaps in her understanding of the public policy process.
“I recognized that I didn’t have the vocabulary to competently talk about the impact of the work that I was doing, and realized that I needed more education to better understand what was happening and what I was actually influencing.”
The Path to Public Policy
As Corley considered her next steps, a friend, the inaugural Regional Dean at Northeastern’s Seattle campus, encouraged her to look into graduate degrees for public policy at the Boston campus. She was intrigued by what she learned and moved to Boston for what she thought would be just two years. While completing her degree, Corley found strong support and encouragement from her professors and supervisors—particularly those at the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy—to apply for a spot in the Law and Public Policy PhD program in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs (The Policy School). She completed both the MPP and PhD in 5 years.
After graduation, Corley stayed in Boston, taking a role as the Transit-Oriented Development Fellow at the policy tank, MassINC. This role positioned her as a community-engaged researcher and lobbyist in the Massachusetts State House while working closely with local communities and the Federal government to advance equity, inclusion, and justice through transportation, land, and economic development in gateway cities. She also remained connected to Northeastern by serving on the Policy School’s advisory committee and teaching as an Adjunct Professor. It was her subsequent role at Conservation Law Foundation as the Director of Research and Partnerships, that deepened her focus on the participatory sciences. She was interested in exploring this approach in more geographic and research areas. When offered the opportunity to help CSSH launch policy programs on the Arlington campus, she couldn’t say no.
“It was an excellent opportunity to bring our programs to an area of the country where CSSH’s emphasis on global and local engagement through experiential liberal arts would make a huge difference, especially given the current social, political, and economic climate. We have very unique strengths as a college in our ability to think in a multi-disciplinary way to address very complex problems. The Policy School has very focused and unique strengths in thinking locally and at the state level, and thinking about how that connects to federal and international affairs.”
Finding a Home at Northeastern
Corley is now the Director of CSSH Programs at the Arlington campus in Virginia, representing all of the college’s academic units, and regularly coordinates with the college’s leadership and academic program directors to ensure consistent and quality graduate programs.
At this campus, Corley also teaches courses in Public Policy and Urban Affairs, such as Urban Theory and Science andTechniques of Policy Analysis. She weaves experiential opportunities into all courses. For example, she has her students explore their favorite neighborhoods and then design research projects to investigate them scientifically, or arranges for students to work with service-learning clients to analyze policies that will make a difference in the communities they serve.
In her scholarly work, Corley emphasizes framing and the dangers of misinformation, whether that’s information taken out of context, distorted, or misinterpreted, or completely false. Her work in the participatory sciences involves building collaborations among individuals, groups, and organizations to better assess information, understand multiple sources of data and knowledge, and consider the negative consequences that distorted information can have on individuals, communities, and societies.
“Everything in our lives is being designed in a way where our information becomes capital that we may not have control over, and the same is true of research. People are starting to see their agency and their sovereignty, and are standing up to take more control over what information they share and what is done with information about them and their communities.”
In the classroom, Corley wants to spark her students’ interests and inspire passion for continuous learning, while helping them realize their own agency and power to change the world. She likes her classes to be dialogic while also making sure that her students have a strong foundational understanding of the underlying principles of what they are learning.
“Teaching is a way for me to learn and grow. Students bring so much to the classroom that I can’t help but learn alongside them. Continuous learning has always been a theme in my life, and I share that passion with many of the professors I had when I was a student and those who are now colleagues.”
