Jelena Grosse-Bley started pursuing her PhD at Humboldt University of Berlin as part of the IRI THESys Graduate Program in 2020. Her project is concerned with the local environmental knowledge of farmers in climate change-affected areas in the People’s Republic of China. She seeks to understand the role local farmers’ knowledge plays in “elite” discourses as well as in agricultural practice around questions of climate change adaptation. She holds an MA in Modern East Asian Studies from Georg August University of Göttingen and an MSc in Environmental Management from The University of Hong Kong. Before joining the China Studies Institute at Freie University of Berlin in 2018 as a lecturer and research affiliate, she spent a number of years studying and working in various locations across Greater China, including two years at Peking University, Beijing.