La Trobe Linguistics Program Zine at University Open Day 2026
I have been enjoying making Lingthusiasm zines, so when we started making plans for our University Open Day this year, I realised that a zine was the perfect format for introducing linguistics, our team, and subjects available. I found they were well suited to this kind of event and wanted to share the experience in case it is useful to others.
Eight-fold zines like these usually work by having a blank inside. I used this to my advantage and printed the very text-dense list of subject overviews on the inside for people to take away and read later.
The fact they're smaller than the usual A4 (letter) handouts made them feel a lot easier to share with people. They also sat really nicely on the table, thanks to some nice little acrylic boxes I found. I printed the La Trobe zines in black and white and they looked really nice. The team gave out about one hundred of them over the course of the day. The only problem with zines is budgeting the time to fold them, but I started a few weeks out and used seminars and online meetings where my hands could be busy.
Alongside the La Trobe zine I also had the current range of Lingthusiasm zines. These were great for both introducing people to linguistics and sharing some of the research topics we work on. It made me think about some more topics I wanted to share with people in zine format for future events.
I brought along kiki/bouba stickers and scarf so that we could do kiki bouba tests and then leave people with the zine. This was particularly effective as a way of having something fun to bring in family and friends who were along to support a prospective student. At least one parent said "this is so cool, you have to study this when you come to university!!"
In previous years I have suffered from what I refer to as Archeology envy, because they always have great props and artefact replicas. Having the zines at the table went a long way to solving that problem for me this year. I'll definitely be returning with them next year.
Below is an image of the table set up we had. All the Lingthusiasm zines are available on the Lingthusiasm website. You can see and print a digital copy of the La Trobe zine here.
