Academic Colonialism and the Politics of Representation: A Critical Analysis Oxford University’s Instagram Rafflesia hasseltii

This study aims to examine the controversy emerging from the official Instagram post by the University of Oxford regarding the discovery of Rafflesia hasseltii in the forests of Sijunjung, West Sumatra, in November 2025, in which the names of local Indonesian researchers were omitted while visual and textual narratives exclusively highlighted the contributions of Oxford affiliated researchers. Specifically, this study pursues three interpretive objectives: (1) to examine how the textual and visual elements of Oxford’s Instagram post construct the epistemic positioning of local Indonesian researchers relative to Western institutional researchers; (2) to analyze how the institution’s revised post reflects or fails to address the power hierarchies embedded in the original publication; and (3) to interpret how audience counter narratives challenge and contest the dominant representational structures produced by Oxford’s institutional communication. This study interprets this phenomenon as a contemporary manifestation of “academic colonialism” operating through the politics of representation within digital spaces. The analysis employs a dual theoretical framework, Stuart Hall and Michel Foucault’s theories of representation and power, alongside the postcolonial critiques of Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and uses Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) following Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design to examine the post’s textual and visual components simultaneously. The findings are interpreted as indicating that the exclusion of local researchers is not merely an administrative oversight but reflects a hierarchical global knowledge-production structure that continues to perpetuate colonial logic. Social media platforms of academic institutions are interpreted as arenas where epistemic power relations are produced, defended, and contested.