John Phyne was born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. He graduated with a B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1980. John’s paternal Chinese grandfather immigrated to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1925 and married into his grandmother’s Irish Catholic family. While he never met his paternal grandfather (who died in 1935), John’s background shaped his interest in racial and ethnic relations. In the late 1970s, media accounts of violence against Blacks in South Africa led to his M. A. thesis on the political sociology of apartheid at McMaster University (1980-83). He received an Ontario Graduate Students Scholarship in 1983. From 1983-88, John’s Ph.D. research (McMaster University) examined the regulatory role of fishery officers in rural Newfoundland. This was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

From 1987-88, John held a one-year position in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. He was a researcher with the Elizabeth Fry Society in Hamilton, Ontario in 1988-89. In 1989, John was hired by the Department of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. He worked there until his retirement in 2020. From 1991 to 2010, John’s research mostly dealt with the socioeconomic and regulatory context of the global salmon aquaculture industry. He received funding from ISER for a three-month research visit to Ireland in 1995. This led to his 1999 monograph on the environmental conflicts associated with Ireland’s salmon farming industry, one of the first monographs on an industry that has received much attention since. John’s work resulted in his invitation to be part of a social science application to AquaNet (1999 to 2006). This was part of a Tri-Council grant on aquaculture involving nearly 200 science, social science and industry participants. John was part of a team of researchers dealing with the institutional structure of salmon aquaculture in Norway, the Faroes and Chile. In 2009, John, and Lynda Harling Stalker of St. Francis Xavier University, held a research grant from the Atlantic Metropolis and Atlantic Research Centres to investigate the social impact of out-migration on the Strait Region of Nova Scotia.

In 2014, John received an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to study slum clearance and urban renewal in the city centre of mid-twentieth century St. John’s. This work is based in an area of St. John’s where his relatives (the Murphy family) lived from the 1860s until 1961. It involves the use of census, archival, but especially qualitative data from interviews with 51 former inhabitants of the city centre. It combines biography, history and social structure in the spirit of eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills. John is authoring a book (with Christine Knott) on the city centre. This work is not only an historical ethnography of the city centre, but it will also contribute to policy recommendations on the need for mixed neighbourhoods, affordable housing and food security in the inner cities of Canada. The objective is to learn from the positive (while remaining critical of the negative) dimensions of former slum areas as a way towards a better urban future.