CV

Kris Decker’s work is essayistic. Kris gets lost in scientific and artistic subcultures, wondering how their thought styles and matters of concern come into being.

A current book project is concerned with the public life of climate issues as they move between activist and artistic realms.

Kris studied in the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland, did fieldwork among a group of climatologists and completed a dissertation in Science Studies in 2019. Kris worked as a researcher at the University of Lucerne and at Zurich University of the Arts, interspersed with longer stays at Queen’s University (Canada), ETH Zurich, and Leiden University (the Netherlands). In Lucerne, Kris has been teaching a variety of STS classes, most recently a seminar on "climate activism, 2018–2024".

As part of an ongoing side-project with Christoph Hoffmann, Kris started to erratically examine the norms and forms of contemporary academic training. That endeavor turns lecture halls and classrooms into sites of observation and is described in a recent Social Studies of Science article.

Beyond the confines of the university, Kris delves into artistic research. Kris was a member of Christoph Schenker’s Hands-on team, observing art-in-the-making in a lithographic atelier. The Swiss National Science Foundation endowed Kris with a SPARK grant, which made it possible to run the Academized Artists project and to engage with epistemological questions in the arts, together with Jules Sturm and Vera Gujer.

In 2020, the manuscript "Im Hinterland der Daten", which deals with the day-to-day practices and thought styles of historical climatologists, received the Merkur Prize in Berlin; it has remained unpublished since. In 2023, the book "Maschinen unter Druck" was nominated by the Stiftung Buchkunst to its shortlist.

In October 2022, Kris became a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (also known as KWI) in Essen.

Publications