Vanessa Heaney

speaker

203 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 22 Nov

Vanessa Heaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Next to a Mexican-American journalist who's on a mission to make voices like hers heard.

Emily Flores is the founder-editor of a media platform which is run by and for young disabled people.

It's one of a few of its kind.

She's been speaking to The Happy Pod's Holly Gibbs about the platform and why she chose what some might see as a controversial name.

It's all about putting young people at the centre.

And I think Cripple Media in particular is all about putting young disabled people in specific in the center.

So Cripple Media is the first ever media platform that's run by and for young disabled people.

So I grew up as a wheelchair user.

I'm a full-time wheelchair user.

And I noticed that growing up, there was a lot of unspoken misconceptions about disability.

There's a disability writer that said it best.

It's almost like when you meet people, it's like they're kind of reading tea leaves about your future, like,

oh, it's so sad that, you know, you're going to have such a sad future.

But there's really nothing sad about it.

And I think that's part of the problem culturally is that disability is not seen as a cultural identity.

And the reason why we named it Cripple Media was 90% of it was a straight up value from our generation, which is that Gen Z is unafraid to kind of

change narratives and confront hard realities.

What would you say to the people who don't get it?

I think it's okay to initially be maybe a little confused, maybe a little put off.

But honestly, what I would want to invite is curiosity.

Showing 101–120 of 203 · page 6 of 11