Tilburg's 'beautiful ugliness' tour

Hi everyone, welcome to our audio tour about Tilburg’s beautiful ugliness. We are Inge Beekmans and Jos Swanenberg, and together, we will show you some of the highlights, or maybe lowlights, of Tilburg, from the perspective of ‘beautiful ugliness’.We’ll do so based on our most recent study, titled ‘Keep Tilburg Ugly’: Celebrating, Challenging and Mocking Traumatic Demolition through Digital Discourse. In this study, we use the Instagram account named @KeepTilburgUgly as a case study as we try to understand how the inhabitants of Tilburg are dealing with the perceived ugliness of their city as a type of heritage from below. Tilburgers call the city ‘beautifully ugly’, or ‘schoon van lelijkheid’ in their local dialect. Not just ‘ugly’. In our study, we use theories from the critical heritage studies movement and digital discourse analysis to better understand what the social media account @KeepTilburgUgly is doing online, and how this might be linked to the creation of heritage and local identities in Tilburg’s physical environment. We also look at the way in which dialect is used to make meaning in this process.The next location of this audio tour can probably best be described using one of the most important dialect words for @KeepTilburgUgly: ‘Lillik’, which means ‘ugly’.