“Not only standing for, but standing up for diversity”: an intersectional qualitative analysis of how university students embody and resist discrimination

Abstract Background Universities are key social institutions that shape student health, wellbeing, and future trajectories. However, they are also embedded in, and contribute to, existing social inequities. Students holding marginalised positions consistently report experiences of discrimination within higher education. Such experiences adversely affect their mental health, sense of belonging, and academic trajectories. Much of this research relies on single-axis analyses, failing to capture the complexity of discrimination. Therefore, this study takes an intersectional, qualitative multi-level approach to explore how university students in Germany experience discrimination during their studies and how this shapes their mental health and wellbeing. Methods Fifteen semi-structured, problem-centred interviews were conducted with university students who reported experiencing discrimination. Data were qualitatively analysed using the Intersectional Multilevel Analysis (IMA) framework by Winker and Degele, linking individual meaning-making and self-positioning to symbolic representations and social structures. Our approach combined inductive reconstruction of students’ self-positionings with deductive contextualisation of how discrimination operates across interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. Results Students experienced discrimination as an embodied process shaped by microaggressions, institutional rigidity, and unequal power relations – particularly within student–lecturer dynamics. These dynamics involved intersecting forms of inequity, including racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, language-based exclusion, ableism, caregiving discrimination, and ageism, experienced not as isolated categories but as overlapping, context-dependent processes. Participants described how the experienced discrimination settled into the body through emotional, cognitive, and physical manifestations expressed as fear, anger, exhaustion, and burnout, accompanied by existential questioning and disrupted identities. These embodied effects were not isolated reactions but ongoing responses to inequity. Alongside these harms, students exercised agency through strategies of endurance, withdrawal and resistance as forms of embodied survival work in response to persistent inequities. Overall, discrimination emerged as a relational and institutional process involving fluid interpersonal dynamics and contextual negotiations through which students’ academic trajectories and relationships to power are continuously (re)produced. Conclusion Discrimination in higher education must be recognised as not only a social issue, but also a critical public health concern determining students' mental health and wellbeing. Addressing its embodied consequences demands institutional accountability and policies that move beyond symbolic diversity rhetoric toward meaningful structural and cultural transformation.