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, queer of color critique, US West studies, and critical ethnography. Broadly, her research centers on the relationship between racialized gender and sexual difference and the construction of nation and region. Her 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, Militarized Deviance: Black Women, Labor and Place-Making 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. Militarized Deviance is an interdisciplinary project that examines race and labor by centering black women and how that can tell a different story about US nation-building. Carney discusses the orchestrated removal of black women in San Diego during the long 20th century. She argues that the displacement of black women assisted in constructing the city as a genric white, all-American tourist and militaristic destination in the region. By using ethnography, cultural production and archival materials, she considers the relationality of black women to space and surveilling in new ways.