SCHOLARSHIP

Alison's research asks how social work's foundational frameworks fail disabled and Deaf people, and what should replace them. It grows out of more than fifteen years of bilingual ASL/English trauma practice and follows three lines of inquiry.

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Language deprivation and identity. How d/Deaf people raised in hearing families experience language deprivation as developmental trauma, and how identity and social-emotional development take shape in response.

Behavioral health access. Service access for Deaf, DeafDisabled, and hard-of-hearing communities, treated as a systems problem rather than an interpreter problem.

Disability Justice critique. Rethinking social work theory, ethics, assessment, and education, including the Embodiment-Identity-Access (EIA) assessment as a clinical alternative to deficit documentation.

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Llamosa, P., & Wetmur, A. B. (2025). For a more holistic conceptualization of clinical supervision: Challenges and opportunities for clinical practice. Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swaf020

Wetmur, A. B. (2024). The experience of growing up Deaf in a hearing-abled family: A phenomenological study. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 51(1). https://doi.org/10.15453/0191-5096.4715 (2026 CSWE Disability Manuscript Award)

Gault, G. L., Wetmur, A. B., Plummer, S., & Findley, P. A. (2023). Violence against people with disabilities: Implications for practice. In E. Slayter & L. Johnson (Eds.), Social work practice and disability communities: An intersectional anti-oppressive approach. Pressbooks.

Sherwood, K., Kattari, S. K., & Wetmur, A. B. (2023). Sexuality, hearing loss, and d/Deaf individuals. In S. K. Kattari (Ed.), Exploring sexuality and disability: A guide for human service professionals (pp. 96-107). Routledge.

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UNDER REVIEW

Wetmur, A. B., & Durant, K. T. (revised and resubmitted). Access is not accommodation: Disability Justice, care ethics, and social work's Rawlsian inheritance. Affilia.

Wetmur, A. B., & Skyer, M. (under review). We are disabled: Ableism, classification, and Deaf political identity. Disability & Society.

Wetmur, A. B., & DeJong-Shier, M. (in revision). Before anyone says no: Anticipatory self-sorting in social work field education.

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CURRENT PROJECTS

Whose job is it to be understood? An ASL interview study of communication-access labor among d/Deaf adults raised in hearing families.

A collaborative autoethnography of Deaf faculty in American academia (with K. Scoresby).

Flipping the Table: Disability Justice Critiques of Social Work's Foundational Frameworks (with K. T. Durant and S. Jackson), an MSW textbook in development.

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TEACHING

Alison teaches across BASW, MSW, and DSW curricula, mostly online, and has taught fifteen distinct courses, including professional ethics, clinical practice theory, psychopathology, social welfare policy, program evaluation, clinical supervision, and justice-informed practice. She coordinates multi-section courses and co-teaches the DSW capstone.

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She developed a Disability Justice course for MSW and BASW curricula and carried it through curriculum approval, redesigned doctoral courses in critical issues in social work education and in advanced psychopathology, and built an ASL curriculum that is now a permanent offering at Connecticut College.