Beyond Coping: Spirituality as an Interpretive and Reparative Knowledge System Among Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in Québec

Clinical and social scientific literature often frames spirituality as a coping mechanism, a cultural characteristic, or a private belief. Those framings capture only part of how it operates for many sub-Saharan African immigrants. Drawing on cognitive justice as an analytical lens, this article asks how sub-Saharan African immigrants in Québec mobilize spirituality as an interpretive and reparative system of knowledge, and what this mobilization reveals about the conditions of cognitive justice in secular professional and institutional environments. The study draws on semi-structured interviews conducted in French with 22 Francophone sub-Saharan African immigrants in Québec, analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings show that spirituality functioned as an interpretive system through which participants discerned the causes of adversity, as a reparative repertoire enacted through prayer, ritual, and community, and as a form of knowledge often concealed in secular institutional encounters out of anticipated judgment or disbelief. These results reframe spirituality as an epistemic system in its own right, rather than as a coping resource alone, and show how its institutional concealment constitutes a form of cognitive injustice. The article proposes Afrocentric spiritual literacy as a practical orientation for researchers and practitioners seeking to engage more ethically with African and Afro-diasporic spiritual worlds.