Lebanon is experiencing the third most severe economic and financial crisis in the world since the mid-nineteenth century, according to a recent World Bank (2021) report. ‘Crises’ (‘azamat) have long been defining features of everyday life, political discourses as well as scholarly framings of Lebanon. So much so that the term ‘crisis’ itself has become a historical ‘super-concept,’ so self-evident and self-referential that it is taken as a priori rather than examined. Mediating between institutional and structural breakdown and crisis action, lies an essential yet undertheorized dimension of crisis: ‘the struggle over interpretation’. The interpretation of crises is a fraught terrain of power, caught between well-established interests and regimes of power on the one hand, and alternative forces for change, on the other (Reed 2016). A given construal of a crisis can either displace and misconstrue the sources of structural breakdown, or contribute in focusing those causes. Rather than take ‘crisis’ as a starting point for sociological analysis, this research seeks to bypass the epistemological impasse crisis narratives reproduce by unpacking how competing narrativizations of crisis can either enable or preclude protest and critique. Through a combination of ethnographic and archival research methods, this research explores how structurings of interpretations of reality as ‘crises’ alter perceptions of civic choices and actions. Archival research examines political discourses and media coverage of the economic and financial crisis. Ethnographic fieldwork consists of semi-structured interviews and participant observation to get to the heart of the everyday experiences of ‘crises’ and shifting modes of political participation in exceptional times. The goal is a tracing of everyday discursive and non-discursive patterns and experiences, to better conceptualize the relationship between epoch-shaping crises and the opening and foreclosure of liminal spaces of political contestation. Contributing to interdisciplinary debates from across social movement studies, political economy, and economic sociology, this research unsettle the veneer of objectivity that surrounds classical economic accounts of ‘crisis’ that naturalize and externalize market economy as a realm separate from political, social and historic construal and contention. Instead, I seek to advance a less deterministic, and more substantive understanding of ‘crises,’ not merely as ‘objective realities,’ but also as ‘subjective historical processes.’ Seeking to complicate the temporal and epistemic framework of crises that have come to characterize the human condition and everyday material realities under late capitalism, this research highlights the centrality of interpretive power struggles within which crises gain meanings and are lived.