Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has built a career on revealing the human stories behind policy and data

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett arrived at Carnegie Mellon, set to study creative writing and journalism  — and, at the behest of her parents, business administration.

“I haven’t really used that one yet,” Elizabeth says of the business admin minor, but the course load meant a meaningful balance between creativity and practicality.

While business administration meant hard skills, her time in the English department “wasn’t training,” she says. “It was an appreciation for language, for how a sentence is structured and the emotions you feel when you read something.”

That balance has served Elizabeth well. In several nonfiction books, Elizabeth, who earned degrees from Dietrich College in 2000 and Heinz College in 2002, has explored everything from Carnegie Tech alumnus Andy Warhol and his influence on creative culture to celebrity and how the aspirational class is creating a deeper divide across social strata.

And that balance in her coursework meant that Elizabeth knew she was in the right place from the start.

“The first night of orientation, I was like, this is the best,” she says. “I loved Carnegie Mellon from the first day. I found my tribe.”

Running towards purpose

In addition to time in the classroom, Elizabeth ran on the cross-country team. “My life was either being in class, doing my homework, or running. I still get sentimental about autumn because it reminds me of cross country,” she says.

Whether it was keeping pace with her team or charting the meter of a poem, these constraints, patterns and structures led to insights that would define her academic life and career.

While she was an undergrad, Elizabeth developed an interest in environmental policy, which led to an influential mentorship with Richard Florida, professor of public policy at Heinz College.  He invited her to help with his research, which would later become his modern classic, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which studied the new “creative social class” and how it would transform cities and the workplace.  

“His influence as a teacher of mine at Carnegie Mellon extended all through my early career,” Elizabeth explains.

Her work with Florida introduced her to a different way of using her writing skills.“I could use this love of language to do a different kind of thing I’d never done before.” She stepped into the role of storyteller, but from the perspective of a social scientist. Through interviews and research, Elizabeth distilled insights from the creative class, helping shape the book's narrative.  

The collaboration also influenced her to continue her studies at CMU pursuing a graduate degree in public policy at Heinz College.

“I loved school, so graduate school felt obvious to me,” she says. And once she completed her graduate degree, it was on to a Ph.D. in Urban Planning at Columbia.

Finding a voice through culture

During her Ph.D. studies, Elizabeth found her voice. “When I was doing my Ph.D. at Columbia, my advisor said my dissertation sounded like a New Yorker article,” she says. “She did not mean it as a compliment.”

But Elizabeth was elated. In a sea of research and data, her work stood out. That was, in part, due to her relentless focus on the narrative she’d held onto since her undergraduate courses.

“It was the transference of that higher-order feeling I got as a poetry major to a practical world,” she says. While she weaves data and research into her work, it’s always driven by finding the narrative that readers can hold on to.

One narrative that’s driven Elizabeth’s work is her focus on culture. Specifically, how it drives belonging, aspiration, and class identity.

“I’m obsessed with culture,” she admits. Culture is the lens through which Elizabeth considers the world. So, in the wake of the 2016 election, it was unsurprising she turned to culture to explain the everyday divides that were becoming more and more apparent.

“One of the biggest divisions in this country is not education or money, it’s culture,” says Elizabeth. “The fact that we value one culture has made a lot of people feel left behind.”

In large part, that’s what inspired her to research and write “The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country” in 2023.

What started as dinner party chatter led to research and insight. After Donald Trump was elected president the first time, Elizabeth heard peers at dinner parties in New York and Los Angeles say, “These people in rural America are so angry,” citing economic disparity and ignorance as reasons for their voting patterns.

Growing up in the rural community of Danville, Pennsylvania, Elizabeth wasn’t so sure. “They’re not mad. This is not the narrative that’s perpetuating. I don’t think it’s the truth,” she says.  

So she ran the numbers.

In rural America, “their unemployment is lower, their home ownership is higher, their median incomes are largely the same,” Elizabeth says. “That led me to ask people directly: what matters to you?”

The questions that followed weren't economics alone but instead focused on meaning: What do people value, and how have elites misunderstood them?

Using the data to fuel field work, she spoke with residents of rural communities, interviewing people across political lines for “The Overlooked Americans.” In her one-on-one conversations, she found she could barely tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

What she found was that the values these communities held deeply, like faith, humanity or service, were often dismissed or misinterpreted by those outside rural America. It was likely cultural misunderstanding rooted in values, not political rage, that has created the division visible in America today.

Just like her book is based on narrative nuance, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to healing the rural-urban divide in America through public policy.

“If we’re going to distribute resources or spend time or put attention on things, you can’t deal with communities in the same exact way. They have different problems and strengths,” she says.

Teaching Empathy

Elizabeth’s empathic approach to understanding public policy comes directly into play in the classroom. As a professor of public policy at the Price School at the University of Southern California, she encourages her students to connect on personal levels as a way to understand economic development, urban policy and planning.

That all connects back to her earliest classroom experiences at Carnegie Mellon. “I value books and learning about another person’s experience as a human. That’s how you change the world.”