University students both embody and resist discrimination, intersectional study reveals

Universities have long presented themselves as gateways of opportunity, yet new research from Germany reveals that for many students, campus life is also a site of persistent discrimination that settles into the body itself, shaping mental health and wellbeing in ways that standard diversity policies fail to address. A qualitative study published in the International Journal for Equity in Health offers a rare, deeply textured account of how discrimination is experienced, embodied, and resisted by university students who occupy marginalised social positions.

The research team, led by Laura Pilz González of the Institute of Health and Nursing Science at Charité – University Medical Center Berlin, together with colleagues from Charité, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Alice Salomon University of Applied Science in Berlin, conducted fifteen semi-structured, problem-centred interviews with university students who reported experiencing discrimination during their studies. Rather than treating discrimination as a single-axis phenomenon, such as racism alone or sexism alone, the investigators applied an intersectional lens, asking how overlapping forms of inequity combine and shift depending on context. The ethical review board of Charité approved the study, and all participants gave informed consent.

The analytical backbone of the study is the Intersectional Multilevel Analysis framework developed by Gabriele Winker and Nina Degele. This framework links three levels of social reality: individual meaning-making and self-positioning, symbolic representations such as stereotypes and cultural imagery, and social structures including institutional rules and power hierarchies. In practice, the researchers combined an inductive reconstruction of how students positioned themselves in their own narratives with a deductive contextualisation of how discrimination operates across interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. This methodological choice matters, because much of the existing literature on higher education discrimination relies on single-category analyses that miss how, for example, a student’s migration background, gender, class position, and caregiving responsibilities interact in a single classroom encounter.

What emerged from the interviews is a picture of discrimination as an embodied process rather than a series of discrete events. Participants described microaggressions, subtle slights and dismissals that accumulate over time, alongside institutional rigidity and markedly unequal power relations, particularly in relationships between students and lecturers. The forms of inequity identified were strikingly varied: racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, language-based exclusion, ableism, discrimination related to caregiving responsibilities, and ageism. Crucially, students did not experience these as isolated categories but as overlapping, context-dependent processes that could shift from one seminar, one lecture hall, or one encounter with an instructor to the next.

The bodily dimension of these experiences is where the study makes perhaps its most urgent contribution to public health thinking. Participants described how discrimination settled into the body through emotional, cognitive, and physical manifestations: fear before entering certain spaces, anger at repeated injustice, exhaustion that deepened into burnout, and existential questioning that disrupted their sense of identity. Students spoke of questioning whether they belonged in higher education at all, of identities fractured by the constant labour of interpreting whether an interaction was discriminatory and whether responding would carry academic risk. The researchers emphasise that these embodied effects were not isolated, one-off reactions but ongoing responses to persistent structural inequity, chronic stress responses with well-documented consequences for mental and physical health.

Yet the study is equally notable for documenting agency. Alongside the harms, students actively developed strategies of endurance, withdrawal, and resistance, which the authors characterise as forms of embodied survival work. Some participants persisted through hostile environments, drawing on personal resolve or support networks. Others withdrew, from specific courses, from interactions with particular staff, or from campus life more broadly, a strategy that protects wellbeing in the short term but can carry long-term academic costs. Still others resisted openly, confronting lecturers, seeking institutional complaints channels, or supporting peers facing similar treatment. The study’s very title echoes this agency: students are, in the words of the research, not only standing for diversity but standing up for it, often without meaningful institutional backing.

The relational character of discrimination emerges as a central analytical finding. Discrimination was not located solely in the intentions of individual actors; instead, it was reproduced through fluid interpersonal dynamics, particularly the asymmetry between students and academic staff, and through institutional procedures that failed to recognise or remedy harm. Complaints mechanisms, where they existed, often felt inadequate or risky. Institutional commitments to diversity frequently existed on paper, but participants perceived a gap between symbolic rhetoric and everyday practice. The authors conclude that academic trajectories and relationships to power are continuously reproduced through these negotiations, meaning that disadvantage is not a fixed attribute of certain students but a dynamic process embedded in institutional life.

The public health implications are significant. Student mental health has become a growing concern across higher education systems internationally, with rising demand for counselling services and increasing recognition that wellbeing is shaped by social conditions, not merely by individual resilience. This study argues that discrimination in higher education must be recognised as not only a social issue but a critical public health concern that directly determines students’ mental health and wellbeing. When marginalised students report fear, anger, exhaustion, burnout, and disrupted identities as consequences of their educational environment, the university functions as a social determinant of health. That framing shifts responsibility from the individual student, who is too often expected to develop coping strategies, to the institution, which shapes the conditions producing the harm in the first place.

The German context adds a specific layer to the findings. German universities have expanded diversity programming in recent decades, yet the study suggests that such programming often stops short of structural and cultural transformation. Students interviewed for the research navigated institutions that celebrated diversity in principle while remaining rigid in practice, from language expectations that disadvantaged non-native speakers to timetabling and assessment structures that ignored caregiving responsibilities, and physical and administrative environments that inadequately accommodated disability. The gap between symbolic diversity rhetoric and lived experience is precisely what the authors identify as a target for reform.

What would meaningful change look like according to the study? The authors call for institutional accountability and policies that move beyond symbolic gestures toward genuine structural and cultural transformation. In practical terms, this implies examining how power operates in student–lecturer relationships, building accessible and trustworthy reporting and remedy mechanisms, designing curricula, assessment, and timetabling that reflect the diversity of students’ lives, and embedding intersectional awareness in staff training so that overlapping forms of discrimination are recognised rather than reduced to single categories. It also means treating the mental health consequences of discrimination as a matter of institutional responsibility, integrated into university health and equity policy rather than left to counselling services alone.

The researchers also acknowledge the emotional labour of the participants themselves, thanking them in the study’s acknowledgements for their willingness to speak about discrimination and expressing hope that the work will amplify their voices and advance institutional awareness. The study was conducted in line with the Declaration of Helsinki, received open-access funding support through Projekt DEAL, and was supported by transcription funding from the German health insurance Techniker Krankenkasse. The authors declare no competing interests.

For researchers in equity and higher education, the study demonstrates the analytical value of combining intersectionality with multilevel qualitative methods. By tracing how structural inequities, symbolic representations, and individual self-positioning interact, it captures a dimension of discrimination that surveys measuring single categories cannot reach. The embodiment framework, in which harms are read through fear, anger, exhaustion, and burnout, also connects the sociology of inequality with health research in a way that is increasingly relevant as universities confront student mental health crises.

For students, educators, and administrators, the message is both sobering and energising. Sobering, because the testimony shows how higher education can quietly erode the wellbeing of the very students it claims to include, through mechanisms as ordinary as a dismissive comment, an inflexible deadline, or an unaddressed complaint. Energising, because the same testimony shows students as active agents who endure, withdraw, and resist, and who are asking institutions to match their courage with accountability. The study’s conclusion is unambiguous: addressing the embodied consequences of discrimination requires more than statements of principle. It requires universities to look honestly at how their own structures reproduce inequity, and to transform them.