• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.358-374
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• 2008

This study examines whether and how ages of child affect accessibility experiences of women and men differently. Space-time accessibility measures based on Time-geographic framework with activity-travel diary datasets in Portland Metro, US were calculated using GIS-based geocomputation, and spatial-temporal patterns of accessibility of dual-earner couples by ages of their youngest child were compared. The results are as follows. (1) Although more women than men work part-time, which would render women more spatial-temporal autonomy, accessibility levels of women are not higher than men's. It implies that there exists another constraint placed on women which largely stems from gender inequality. (2) It is distinctively women with child under age 6 of which accessibility spaces are found to be restricted doser to home compared to men. Women with no child or with child aged over 6, however, show more or less similar spatial-temporal patterns of accessibility with men's which are quite unvarying regardless of parental status and their child age. Women's accessibility experiences characterized by spatial-temporal entrapment, thus, can be seen as problems associated with gender rather than sex. (3) Intensified spatial-temporal entrapment of women with young child are associated with the significant spatial pegs shaping their accessibility spaces, which are located much closer to home compared to men's: workplaces and child's daycare centers.

• Asian review of World Histories
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.5-44
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• 2013

This essay offers a historically based critique of the idea of "alternative modernities" that has acquired popularity in scholarly discussions over the last two decades. While significant in challenging Euro/American-centered conceptualizations of modernity, the idea of "alternative modernities" (or its twin, "multiple modernities") is open to criticism in the sense in which it has acquired currency in academic and political circles. The historical experience of Asian societies suggests that the search for "alternatives" long has been a feature of responses to the challenges of Euromodernity. But whereas "alternative" was conceived earlier in systemic terms, in its most recent version since the 1980s cultural difference has become its most important marker. Adding the adjective "alternative" to modernity has important counter-hegemonic cultural implications, calling for a new understanding of modernity. It also obscures in its fetishization of difference the entrapment of most of the "alternatives" claimed--products of the reconfigurations of global power--within the hegemonic spatial, temporal and developmentalist limits of the modernity they aspire to transcend. Culturally conceived notions of alternatives ignore the common structural context of a globalized capitalism which generates but also sets limits to difference. The seeming obsession with cultural difference, a defining feature of contemporary global modernity, distracts attention from urgent structural questions of social inequality and political injustice that have been globalized with the globalization of the regime of neoliberal capitalism. Interestingly, "the cultural turn" in the problematic of modernity since the 1980s has accompanied this turn in the global political economy during the same period. To be convincing in their claims to "alterity", arguments for "alternative modernities" need to re-articulate issues of cultural difference to their structural context of global capitalism. The goal of the discussion is to work out the implications of these political issues for "revisioning" the history and historiography of modernity.