Understanding Inequalities and Mental Well-being in Higher Education: An Afrocentric Perspective.

Grounded in an Afrocentric epistemological framework, this research study aimed to deepen culturally relevant insights into mental well-being in higher education by foregrounding African worldviews, relationality, and collective healing practices. Through Participatory Action Research (PAR), data were collected at two historically White universities via narrative interviews and photo-voice, allowing 20 students to reflect on and document their lived experiences of inequality and mental well-being within institutional contexts. The findings demonstrate that structural inequalities manifesting directly through institutional exclusion and inequalities in access to educational and financial resources, severely disrupt the relational networks central to an Afrocentric understanding of well-being, significantly impacting students’ mental well-being and their communal sense of belonging within university settings. Participants articulated experiences of anxiety, isolation, stress, and cultural dislocation associated with unequal educational backgrounds and exclusionary institutional cultures. Concurrently, the research study underscores culturally rooted coping mechanisms, including prayer, peer solidarity, community support, and collective belonging, as important sources of resilience and healing. Through the integration of PAR with Afrocentric epistemologies, this research contributes to the expanding scholarship on decolonial approaches to student mental well-being by contesting dominant Eurocentric biomedical paradigms. It provides a culturally grounded framework for comprehending mental well-being in higher education and offers practical insights for the development of equitable, inclusive, and culturally responsive mental well-being support systems that promote epistemic justice within university contexts.