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In Medellín, Colombia, hundreds of youth and community groups participate in activities aimed at transforming their lives and the interconnected lives of their neighbors. These activities are not necessarily conceived of as activism but they are also not politically passive; they are distinct from both survival strategies and “everyday resistance” but their relationships to the state and/or the rich and powerful are unstable. In this sense, these activities relate to but do not fit neatly within Asef Bayat’s framework of “quiet encroachment,” describing the “silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive and improve their lives”. Rather, they suggest a malleable kind of “quiet” action, one that moves both against and with state prerogatives. Building on the notion of quiet encroachment, and even more nuanced depictions coming out of Bayat’s later work, we describe the politics of recent activities accomplished by youth and community groups as a kind of “nonmovement” work, accomplished through spatial, affective, and organizational gains, that sits upon the more active political networking of previous eras.

Introduction: This paper uses the case of puberty to characterize a new health science framework called Bio3Science and to provide an example of how trending research on biosocial mechanisms can be put to use to bridge siloed disciplines as well as the translational gap. Examined as an intricate, open-ended problem of scientific understanding, puberty offers a window to examine how three dimensions of human life – biology, biography, and biosphere – can be understood to shape human health and disease. Methods: Using the Bio3Science framework, a biosocial model of puberty was developed and critiqued by an interdisciplinary group of health science and social science researchers in a design studio setting. Results: The design and critique process resulted in a model and new conceptual framework that depicts puberty as a highly variable life experience that integrates multiple dense interactions and context-specific responses; within this model, the gene regulatory network (GRN) transformed from a biological to a biosocial mechanism, with conceptual and concrete applications. Conclusions: By providing a new, generalizable framework for understanding the integration of biology, biography, and biosphere in health research, opportunities emerge for more interdisciplinary work puberty, but also and more broadly, for more collaborative, inter-epistemological health research through the Bio3Science framework. Keywords: Bio3Science, puberty, biosocial, gene regulatory network, normality

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