SIT Study Abroad selected as finalist for 2021 GoAbroad Innovation Awards

Announcement Date: May 12, 2021

SIT Study Abroad is proud to announce it has been named a finalist in two categories for the 2021 GoAbroad Innovation Awards. These awards honor institutions, organizations, and individuals within international education who are creating initiatives to move the field forward and commend leaders in the community for their efforts to go beyond the conventional. 

GoAbroad selected SIT Study Abroad’s Senegal: Hip-hop, African Diaspora & Decolonial Futures as a finalist for the Innovative New Program category. Launched in 2020, the semester-long program based in Dakar focuses on centering the voices of artists and activists in the local community in an authentic way through a cutting-edge interdisciplinary lens. As part of the program, students carefully engage with dominant narratives about people of African descent in ways that critique colonial interpretations of Africa and move them toward a consciousness that decolonizes the “idea of Africa” and the African diaspora. 

In addition, SIT Study Abroad’s 2019 video contest winner “SIT’s Morocco: Field Studies in Journalism and New Media Program” by Stephen Higgins was selected as a finalist for the Innovative Student Video category. Higgins’ video showcases the highlights of his study abroad experience that semester and conveyed the authenticity of the environment with a deeper understanding of the Moroccan culture in which he was immersed. The winner of the Innovative Student Video category is selected by popular vote. Visit GoAbroad’s online form to vote for Higgins’ SIT Study Abroad video before voting ends on May 28. 

This isn’t the first time SIT has been recognized by GoAbroad’s Innovation Awards. In 2020, the institution won the first-ever award for Innovation in Crisis Response for Operation Bring Our Students Home, during which SIT repatriated 920 undergraduate and graduate students from 56 program locations around the world over a two-week period in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus. 

The 2021 winners will be announced at the GoAbroad Innovation Awards virtual event  on June 3, held during the annual NAFSA Conference and Expo.