She has conducted research on international development, the global economy, urban ethnography, race, gender, class, and women in the labor force.

She is the author of For We are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier and The Hero's Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore and the Shadow of the State.

Fernández-Kelly's research focuses on international development, global economy, urban ethnography, race, gender, class, and women in the labor force.

Between 1993 and 2004, she led several ethnographic modules related to the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey (CILS) spearheaded by sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut.

Fernández-Kelly coined the term expressive entrepreneurship to designate tendencies among the children of immigrants to use art as a means to circumvent the stringencies of markets in the age of neo-liberalism.

[11] With Douglas S. Massey, Fernández-Kelly investigated the role of NAFTA in the context of Mexico-U.S. Migration during roughly the same period that the bilateral treaty has been in effect.

[12] As part of her dissertation research at Rutgers University, Fernández-Kelly designed an ethnographic study that included participant observation, the administration of a survey, and the collection of oral histories about young women employed in "maquiladoras"—i.e.

[15] Fernández-Kelly has an interest in gender and international economic development; her research on the subject shows that the application of neo-liberal economic policies, starting in the 1980s resulted in the atomization of the labor force in terms of gender, with an increasing number of women employed in the formal and informal labor forces, and more and more men performing jobs with characteristics akin to those associated with women's employment.

[15] In The Hero's Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore and the Shadow of the State (2016), she argues that poverty in U.S. cities is qualitatively distinct from impoverishment in other parts of the world.

She distinguishes between mainstream and liminal government institutions—the former dealing with people as citizens and market actors and the latter operating on the basis of ambivalent benevolence through policies of surveillance, containment and penalization aimed at vulnerable populations, especially those formed by African Americans.