Kevser Çınar, is an Associate Professor of Tourism Management at Necmettin Erbakan University, Türkiye, and she serves as Advisor to the President of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA). She has also held editor and co-editor positions at TÜBA-HER (Higher Education) and TÜBA-KED (Cultural Inventory) journals. She is the President of the Euro-Asia Tourism Studies Association (EATSA). With over 20 years of experience in EU-funded projects, she has coordinated and partnered in more than 30 Projects and published several books, book chapters and articles on tourism innovation, sustainability, digitalization and entrepreneurship. She is also a TEDx speaker and certified curriculum developer, and frequently deliver keynotes and speeches at international conferences and project events worldwide.
Engagement as a Bridge to Sustainability: Cultural Storytelling, Environmental Learning, and Responsible Attachment
Abstract
Environmental sustainability is more than just transmitting basic facts. It is a question of how cultural meanings, emotions, and values are experienced and internalized. Drawing on empirical work in a gamified digital storytelling context embedded in cultural heritage tourism conducted in Konya, Türkiye, this talk considers engagement as a prominent mechanism connecting cultural storytelling to environmental learning and responsible attachment. The findings reveal that usability and source credibility play a decisive role in fostering user engagement, which in turn significantly influences affective image formation and learning outcomes. Especially, argument quality does not have a direct effect on engagement, and thus emotional immersion and experiential design may be more important than informational or rational language. Such a finding challenges conventional persuasion techniques and aligns with sustainability research, indicating that long-term environmental behavioural orientation arises more from emotional proximity than from mere cognitive training. By emphasizing the emotional and experiential groundwork for engagement, this paper sees cultural storytelling as a potent channel for environmental education. Engagement performs as a connection through which cultural narratives engender place-based attachment, care, and responsibility. Thus, how this approach can guide sustainability-oriented cultural policy, heritage education, and the design of meaningful experiences capable of supporting environmental stewardship under contemporary ecological challenges will be discussed at the end of the paper.
Keywords: Cultural storytelling, Environmental sustainability, User engagement, Environmental learning, Responsible attachment