Despite the pervasive presence of graffiti in university settings, scholarly research on this communicative practice remains in its nascent stages, with limited exploration of its cultural significance and its role in promoting student agency and expression. This study uses graffiti as a lens to examine cultural production in student spaces through discourse analysis and ethnographic observation of the walls of the Writing and Tutoring Centers of the American University of Kuwait. Building upon the emerging body of research on graffiti in university settings (Dombrowski, 2011; Farnia, 2014; Al-Khawalda, et al. 2017) this study analyzes graffiti in academic support spaces as complex sites of cultural production and communities of practice. The analysis draws on Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and Wenger's theory of Communities of Practice to highlight how students express, negotiate, create, and re-appropriate the academic space through collective participation and negotiation of meaning, producing a cultural space that promotes students' agency and enriches their sense of belonging to a community of practice. Discourse analysis of the corpus suggests that graffiti in academic support centers functions as a complex communicative practice, serving multiple roles: as a site of collective identity formation, emotional expression, and membership. The research contributes to the limited scholarly discourse on university graffiti by exploring how students create culture in academic spaces that are simultaneously institutional and intimate, formal and informal, and extends to its applications in virtual and digital learning spaces promoting similar student engagement.

Keywords: Communities of Practice, discourse analysis, graffiti, student agency, academic support, university, learning spaces.