Sun Rui
孙睿

Sun Rui is a Visiting Fellow in the Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology training program at the Harvard-Yenching institute for the 2021-22 academic year. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation with a temporary title “Living a Perishable Life in Accelerationist China: Flowers, Time, and Aesthetics,” under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Kipnis. She did her fieldwork at the Dounan fresh-cut flower wholesale market in Yunnan province, southwestern China in 2019-20. She explores in her doctoral thesis how the commodity chain of fresh-cut flowers is mobilized by aesthetic urges through the mutual imbrications of the appreciation of perishable beauty and the pursuit of freshness. Before joining CUHK, she graduated from the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Yunnan University in 2017, with a M.Phil. thesis on “The Religious Life of Cross-border Myanmar Kachins.” Her research interests include economic anthropology, anthropology of religion, consumption, semiotics and time in post-socialist China.