Red X iconGreen tick iconYellow tick icon
Microsoft outage The outage affecting Microsoft Services has reportedly been resolved. Find out more
Skip to main content

Neil Vallelly imageBA, MA (Queen's University Belfast); PhD (Otago)

Senior Lecturer

Contact details

Room 6C12, Richardson Building
Tel +64 3 479 3074
Email neil.vallelly@otago.ac.nz

Research interests

Neil's research crosses the areas of critical and social theory, continental philosophy, and critical border studies.

His is author of Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness, published in 2021 in the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) series with Goldsmiths Press. The book told the story of forms of social and psychological entrapment within contemporary capitalism. An Italian translation of the book, under the title Vite Rubate, was published in March 2022.

He is co-author of Edges of Empire: The Politics of Immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980-2020 (Auckland University Press, 2025). Through interviews with 15 of the previous 18 Ministers of Immigration, the book charts the transformations in migration politics and policies in Aotearoa New Zealand since the early 1980s.

Neil’s writing has appeared in leading academic journals such as Angelaki; Theory & Event; Politics, Philosophy and Critique; Deleuze & Guattari Studies; Critical Times; Poetics Today; Organization; and Journal of Gender Studies, and he has written for several public outlets, including Jacobin, New Internationalist, and Overland. He has appeared on numerous radio platforms and podcasts, including the BBC and RNZ.

In 2022, Neil was awarded a Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship by Te Apārangi, the Royal Society of New Zealand for a project on neoliberalism and migrant detention. He is also a recipient of an Early Career Distinction in Research Award (2026) and a Prestigious Writing Grant (2027) for a book project on border counter-imaginaries, both awarded by University of Otago | Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.

He is co-editor of the journal Counterfutures: Left Thought & Practice Aotearoa, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy.

Teaching

I co-ordinate:

  • SOCI 101 Sociology of New Zealand Society
  • SOCI 202 Big Ideas in Sociology
  • SOCI 306 Public Sociology
  • SOCI/CRIM 308 Abolition in the 21st Century (with Dr Peyton Bond)

I teach into:

  • CRIM 214 Power, Inequality and Social Harm

Areas of postgraduate supervision

  • Critical Theory
  • Continental Philosophy (esp. phenomenology and poststructuralism)
  • Marxist Theory
  • Neoliberalism and Capitalism
  • Critical Border Studies
  • Social Theory

Current postgraduate supervision

PhD

  • Niall Campbell, Incels and Online Forums (co-supervisor)
  • Zhen Liu, Rethinking Precarity through China: Labour, Governance, and Affective Life (co-supervisor)
  • Oskar Primbs (Auckland), Anticapitalist Aotearoa: Reconceptualising Crisis and Emancipatory Struggle in New Zealand (co-supervisor)
  • Maryam Tarighat Bin, A Comparative Study of Gender Expectations in Commercial Advertisements of Western and Eastern Countries: A Butlerian, Foucauldian and Goffmanian Analysis (co-supervisor)

MA

  • Dane Tuialii, Refusal (supervisor)

Publications

Vallelly, N., & Barber, S. (2026). Neoliberalism? Let's talk corporate capture, profit and privatisation. In The far-right playbook. (pp. 59-65). Wellington, New Zealand: ActionStation Aotearoa. Chapter in Book - Research

Vallelly, N. (2026). The borders of hospitality: From Derrida to Manaakitanga. Philosophy, Politics & Critique, 3(1), 1-21. doi: 10.3366/ppc.2026.0097 Journal - Research Article

Vallelly, N. (2026, February). Borders-as-flesh: Notes on a political counter-imaginary. Verbal presentation at the Crossing Borders Symposium, Dunedin, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

Vallelly, N. (2025, November). Border-as-flesh, border-as-ethics. Verbal presentation at the 27th Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ) Conference: Health, Wellness and Care, Dunedin, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

Vallelly, N. (2025). Border-as-flesh: Towards a theory of border reversibility. Theory & Event, 28(4), 587-609. doi: 10.1353/tae.2025.a971352 Journal - Research Article

Back to top