As a scholar, Carney's thinking is guided by a strong commitment to advancing the intersectional and interdisciplinary study of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and culture through research, teaching, and service. Her areas of research specialization include black feminisms, black sexualities, sex work studies, queer of color critique, US West studies. Broadly, her research centers on the relationship between racialized gender and sexual difference and the construction of nation and region. This research puts into conversation gender and sexuality studies and African American history and culture to advance a feminist geography of the US West that centers black gendered and sexual labor. Her work has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, University of Missouri Research Board, and College of Arts & Science at the University of Missouri. 

Her book, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and Militarized Deviance in San Diego, is the first scholarly analysis of the topic to look critically at gender, blackness, and sexuality in the city of San Diego. Disreputable Women is a book about how marginalized sex working black women navigate undesirability by crafting a “politics of the disreputable” which confronts and confounds the state—particularly the militarized conditions of San Diego. Carney argues that heterosexual, trans and gender non-conforming outlaws defied heteropatriarchal norms of white domesticity by using private space in black institutions for sex work in San Diego. These black queer subjects found clandestine and creative ways to escape surveillance and incarceration. Here, I map the disreputable zones and practices that black disreputable women take up. She uses the disreputable, a black feminist framework, to attend to the historical, political, economic, and epistemic shifts of black women’s sex work and reproductive labor in 20th century San Diego. Using ethnography, archival methods, literary analysis, and black feminist analysis, she situates the world-making of disreputable women, examining different articulations of cultural-sexual-gender politics, which might be a model and an instructive for a black-queer feminist framework.