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Welcome to
Centre for Creative Ethnography

Willemien Froneman

Willemien Froneman

A change manager, author, ethnographer, and researcher, Willemien holds advanced degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Stellenbosch. She has developed progressive ethnographic and multidisciplinary methods, and has researched and published extensively on race formation, affect and sound. Her book The Groovology of White Affect is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2024.

Willemien’s experience includes several years in academia in research, postgraduate supervision, research management, and conflict resolution roles. Some of her innovations involve designing and institutionally managing the implementation of decolonial and open-ended interdisciplinary degree programs in the arts, embracing new digital formats for academic writing and publishing, harnessing AI and machine learning for research in the arts and humanities, and supervising path-breaking ethnographic, native digital, and arts-based postgraduate projects.

  • Book

    The Groovology of White Affect: Boeremusiek and the Enregisterment of Race in South Africa. In press, Palgrave Macmillan (Forthcoming, March 2024).

  • Chapters
    1. ‘Singing Cowboys and Alpine Goat Herds: The Passaggio of Nature to Culture in Afrikaans Yodelling’, with Stephanus Muller. In Cultural Relations between Switzerland and South Africa, 1948-1994. Chris Walton and Stephanus Muller (Forthcoming, 2024)
    2. ‘Music’s “Non-Political Neutrality”: When Race Dare Not Speak its Name’, with Stephanus Muller. In Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science, and Society, Jonathan Jansen, Sun Press (2020). Also see: https://herri.org.za/5/willemien-froneman-stephanus-muller/
  • Peer-Reviewed Articles
    1. ‘A Musical Offering to the Recomposed University’, with Stephanus Muller, South African Review of Education (In Press, forthcoming 2024)
    2. ‘“Stockhausenesque”: Musical Vanguardism during the “Durban Moment”’. Twentieth-Century Music (2023).
    3. ‘The Ears of Apartheid’, Social Dynamics, Special Issue on Apartheid and the Unconscious (2023).
    4. ‘Editing for Change: From Global Bibliometrics to a Local Aporetics of Form in South African Journal Publishing’, with Stephanus Muller, Journal for Transformation in Higher Education, Vol 7 (2022).
    5. ‘After Fame: A Micro-Ethnography of Popular Late Style’, Popular Music & Society, 41/4 (2018), 424-439.
    6. ‘Ex-Centric Hermeneutics in Stephanus Muller’s Nagmusiek’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, Vol. 49/1 (2018), 179-194.
    7. ‘Music and Landscape: Two Tales of Borehole Drilling in the Karoo’, Cultural Geographies, 22/4 (2015), 713-722.
    8. ‘Subjunctive Pleasure: The Odd Hour in the Boeremusiek Museum’, Popular Music, 33/1 (2014), 1-17.
    9. ‘Seks, ras en boeremusiek: agter die retoriek van gebrekkige sanglus by die 1938-Voortrekkereeufees’, LitNet Akademies, 11/2 (2014).
    10. ‘She Danced Alone: Jo Fourie, Songcatcher of the Groot Marico’, Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 21/1 (2012), 53-76. [Q2]
    11. The Riches of Embarrassment [On doing ethnography at home], Critical Arts, 25/2 (2011), 309-315. [Q2]
    12. ‘”Composing According to Silence”: Undecidability in Derrida and Cage’s Roaratorio’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 41/2 (2010), 293-317.
    13. ‘The Desire for the Ineffable: On the Myth of Music as Absolute’, Koers, Vol. 74/4 (2009), 1-22.
  • Editorial

    Co-editor (with Stephanus Muller) of the journal SAMUS: South African Music Studies, Vol. 34/35 (2015), Vol. 36/37 (2017), Vol. 38 (2018).

    1. Editorial: ‘The Ethical Incomplete’, Vol. 38 (2018).
    2. Editorial: ‘“De Lô” in Fallist Times’, Vol. 36/37 (2017).
    3. Editorial: ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, Vol. 34/35 (2015).
  • Popular Writing / Other
    1. ‘Beyond a Hollow Account of Musical Interracialism, Moya: Literary Journal of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity (2023): https://www.afremoya.com/issues/spotlight/beyond-a-hollow-account-of-musical-interracialism
    2. ‘Resisting the Siren Song of Race’ in herri7 (2022): https://herri.org.za/7/willemien-froneman/
    3. 4000-word essay on ‘Boeremusiek’ in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: African Genres (2019).
    4. ‘Stitching up the Auto/Biographical Seam: An Interview with Stephanus Muller’ in More Truthful Fictions: Conversations with Biographical Novelists around the World, Michael Lackey, Bloomsbury (2018).