Kris Decker’s work is essayistic. It often starts with Science Studies-inspired questions.

Currently, Kris is writing footnotes to the climate crisis and observes – through iterative fieldwork – how the public life of climate issues unfolds over time. How do activist, scientific, and artistic takes on the climate as a matter of concern come into being, flourish, converge, spread out, fall apart?

Kris studied in the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland, did fieldwork among a climatological subculture and completed a dissertation 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 Science Studies classes, most of them research-based, that engage students in finding their own trails through contemporary climate cultures.

In 2022 and 2023, Kris was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. In the winter of 2024/25, Kris was a Descartes Fellow at the Universiteit Utrecht.

An ongoing side-project with Christoph Hoffmann is concerned with the norms and forms of contemporary academic training. That endeavor – turning towards lecture halls, classrooms, field trips, as sites of observation – has remained a thought experiment so far.

In 2020, the manuscript of Im Hinterland der Daten, which deals with the day-to-day practices and thought styles of historical climatologists, received the Merkur Prize in Berlin. In 2023, the essay Maschinen unter Druck was on Stiftung Buchkunst’s shortlist of Die schönsten deutschen Bücher.

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 then 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.

Footnotes to the Climate Crisis (2023–ongoing)

Academized Artists (2021–2023)

Hands-on (2018–2022)

Im Hinterland der Daten (2014–2025)