Léopold’s PhD explores the Sámi oral tradition, particularly the practice of juoigat (yoiking) and its contemporary uses in community health and resilience, decolonization, and democratic participation. Yoik refers to an ancestral Sámi vocal technique based on imitation games that aim to experience social relationships, memory and to connect people, animals and places. Through sounds and bodily movements, yoiks project atmospheres of proximity with the surrounding environment and vividly communicate fundamental ideas about Sámi culture and society. This fieldwork and qualitative data collection were conducted through an inclusive dialogue that emphasized the participants' perspectives, an approach that was crucial to the quality and ethics of the ethnographic relationships.
Léopold documented how young Sámi people find themselves caught up in conflicting socio environmental processes in which the demand for indigenous Sámi rights is interwoven with environmental preservation and the mining boom of the energy transition. Their quests for meaning, identity and recognition in modernity correspond to complex social situations grappling with the legacy of colonialism and the socio-economic paradoxes of contemporary Sweden. He studied a mining conflict happening in Gállok, near the village of Jåhkåmåhkke, and related to a proposed iron ore mine, a current issue directly linked to the question of the recognition of Sámi indigenous rights and the energy transition. While a mine in Gállok would cause significant pollution and severely disrupt the dynamics of Sámi reindeer herding in this region, which is already under considerable pressure due to climate change and extractivism, industrial projects may represent attractive economic opportunities for young Sámi and local communities. His research conceptualizes yoik as a mode of action through which Sámi engage collectively in these socio-environmental dynamics linked to the energy transition in Arctic. Yoiks imitation games may express profound wishes of Sámi people to continue living and passing on specific ways of inhabiting their lands and renew traditional activities and relationships with humans and non-humans. To spatial appropriations of extractivism, to the ecological crisis, Sámi respond and protest with their oral tradition which sustains place-based meanings, belonging and social action, through which they recognize each other as Sámi in modernity.
Léopold’s academic formations in political sciences, philosophy and anthropology have equipped him with a strong sense of interdisciplinarity which is very important to understand and theorize complex indigenous perspectives linked to land rights and mining. He has the conviction that Indigenous Peoples carry highly relevant perspectives on climate change and extractivism, and he wishes to contribute to their efforts of decolonization and community healing and building. He has publicly shared the progress of his research through several articles and presentations on the themes of yoik, colonialism, Sámi resurgence, and the complex and conflicted relationships of young Sámi people with extractivism. His work provides him with a thoughtful and original conceptual framework for analysing the initiatives and actions of Arctic Indigenous groups regarding human-animal relationships, place-based identities, the mining industry, and the energy transition. His research is now extending to traditional Sámi uses of copper and Sámi experiences of, and oppositions to, copper mining.