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We examined perceptions of precarity in higher education by conducting interviews with a cohort of academics in Israel. The participants were 1.5 generation immigrants who were born in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and then moved to Israel as children or teenagers with their family, typically in the 1990s. Using a narrative research approach, we examined the personal perceptions of 43 academics employed at colleges and universities in Israel. Despite differences in their employment status and contract conditions, our findings made clear that all the academics in our cohort had experienced employment precarity. Using a Bourdieusian framework, we attribute Israeli academic precarity to a deficiency in the cultural and social capital necessary for establishing relevance. Although they had been relatively successful in integrating into Israeli society, and had decades of living within it, our interviewees from all types of academic institutions reported feelings and experiences of extreme precarity. This precarity was ascribed by interviewees to the structure of the Israeli higher education market, which is characterized by an unstable, hyper-competitive, and neoliberal environment, leaving minority groups employed within it particularly vulnerable.

The under-representation of minorities at senior levels in academia has received some research attention in recent years. However, the experience of immigrant women from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israeli academia has not been examined. These women are mostly from a generation known as the '1.5 generation' who immigrated to Israel as children. This study focuses on the intersection of immigration and gender that shape the lives and careers of the 1.5 generation women currently employed as senior academics in Israel. Using the theoretical framework of capital, Bourdieu's concepts of cultural and social capital, as well as Borjas' ethnic capital, we analyzed twenty in-depth interviews to examine the perception of these women, their life story, and their professional integration into Israeli academia. We identified two focal points that fostered their success – (1) the Soviet heritage- selective adoption of ethnic capital, encompassing cultural and social capital of an ethnic group and (2) role models within and outside the family often based on ethnicity. We discuss the obstacles faced by minorities in attempting integration into selective professional guilds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]