This paper reviews work in several disciplines to distinguish between image, reputation and stigma. It also shows that there has been little research on the process by which area reputations are established and sustained through transmission processes. This paper reports on research into the portrayal of two social housing estates in the printed media over an extended period of time (14 years). It was found that negative and mixed coverage of the estates dominated, with the amount of positive coverage being very small. By examining the way in which dominant themes were used by newspapers in respect of each estate, questions are raised about the mode of operation of the press and the communities' collective right to challenge this. By identifying the way regeneration stories are covered and the nature of the content of positive stories, lessons are drawn for programmes of area transformation. The need for social regeneration activities is identified as an important ingredient for changing deprived-area reputations.

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This collective discussion proposes a novel understanding of intelligence as a social phenomenon, taking place in a social space that increasingly involves actors and professional fields not immediately seen as part of intelligence. This discussion is a response to the inherent functionalism in Intelligence Studies (IS) that conceives of intelligence as a cycle serving policymakers. Instead, our interventions seek to problematize and break with this notion of the cycle and show what an alternative study of intelligence would look like. In the first part of the discussion, we situate our intervention in the broader fields of IS and International Political Sociology. Espousing a transdisciplinary approach, we build our four interventions as transversal lines cutting through a social space in which agents with differing stakes participate and reframe the meaning and practice of intelligence. Intelligence professionals not only have to reckon with policymakers, but also increasingly with law enforcement agents, representatives from the science and technology sector, judges, lawyers, activists, and Internet users themselves. Each move takes a step further away from the intelligence cycle by introducing new empirical sites, actors, and stakes.

As the covert and clandestine practices of states multiplied in the twentieth century, so did these practices’ footprint in public life. This footprint is not just visual and material but sonic and aural, sounding the ‘secret state’ into being and suggesting ways of ‘listening in’ on it. Using multisensory methodology, this article examines Careless Talk Costs Lives, a UK Second World War propaganda campaign instructing citizens on how to practice discreet speech and listening in defence against ‘fifth columnist’ spies. This campaign reproduced the British secret state in the everyday: it represented sensitive operations as weaving in and out of citizens’ lives through imprudent chatter about ‘hush-hush’ activities and sounds you shouldn't overhear. The paradox at the campaign's heart – of revealing to people the kind of things they shouldn't say or listen to – made the secret state and its international operations a public phenomenon. Secret sounds therefore became entangled within productions of social difference, from class inequalities to German racialisation. Sound and listening, however, are unwieldy phenomena. This sonic life of the secret state risked undermining political legitimacy, while turning public space and idyllic environments into deceptive soundscapes – for international espionage, it seemed, sounded like ordinary life.