In his paper "Grassroots globalization and the research imagination", Arjun Appadurai challenges academics to develop ways of researching and engaging with the victims of globalisation. A key objective of Appadurai's is to sketch out the problematic and build up the terrain on which a democratisation of research about globalisation might take place. I argue that in order to proceed in ways that are productive for developing a critical research imagination, we must begin by first interrogating the conceptual tools we use to understand globalisation. I identify three absences that are evident in current approaches by researchers working on globalisation and education which seem to me to be particularly pressing; first, the absence of a critical spatial analytic; second, the absence of subaltern or alternative knowledges; and third, the absence of research reflecting on the altered terrain and politics of democratic representation as a result of global processes. In the concluding section I return to the idea of a social imaginary and introduce several experiments with the development of dialogical approaches to knowledge production based on participatory parity. (Contains 2 notes.)